Erasing the Greek presence: The last of a historic community in Jerusalem are vanishing Submitted by Sean Mathews on Tue, 12/09/2025 - 09:23 In this excerpt from New Byzantines, Sean Mathews writes about the Christian minority being sidelined despite a burgeoning geopolitical partnership between Greece and Israel Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem Theophilos III enters the Basilica of the Nativity in the biblical city of Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank on 6 January, 2025 (AFP/Hazem Bader) Off Excerpted from The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East by Sean Mathews (C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd, £20). Walking from the Austrian Hospice in Jerusalem’s Muslim Quarter to Jaffa gate, you can spot the flags of Israeli settlers dangling out of windows and above rooftop water-tanks. The hospice was constructed 150 years ago by another empire which was devoured by the First World War, the Austro-Hungarian. Like the Ottoman one, it was of the East and cosmopolitan. The hospice was built for Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. Its halls are tiled in cemento and the gardens are manicured but not overdone. The Austrian Hospice is the only place I know in the Muslim Quarter where you can sip a glass of wine, which I needed after being in ideological and suspicion-riven Jerusalem, but some of the customers are also pious Muslims. The takeaway is that no one here cares if you are Jewish, Muslim, or Christian. Even the Israeli settlers haven’t gone after the hospice yet. In that sense, it reminds me of Cairo’s Greek Club. It is not a coincidence that these Levantine redoubts are where local authorities’ oppressive rule and stifling social and religious codes subside. I left this sanctuary after a morning coffee to meet George, the leader of the Greek community in Jerusalem’s Old City, at Samaras Cafe next to Jaffa Gate. The Petra and Imperial Hotels that the settlers had seized were above us. Jaffa Gate is the Old City’s meeting point. It was crowded with people, even though tourists were staying away due to the war. George told me that like the Palestinians, Greek Jerusalemites face the same problem of being non-Jews in an increasingly intolerant Jewish state: "The Jews have decided they don’t want anyone but them left in Jerusalem. Doesn’t matter if it’s Christians or Muslims. But they especially don’t like us Greeks because we aren’t Palestinians, but have been here for generations. There were literally thousands of Greeks here. We kept Christianity alive in the Holy Land. The last of us are a thorn in their side." 'There were literally thousands of Greeks here. We kept Christianity alive in the Holy Land. The last of us are a thorn in their side.' - George, Greek leader in Jerusalem There are different statistics on the exact number of Greeks who once lived here. Michael Vatikiotis, a journalist and son of the late Greek-Jerusalemite scholar PJ Vatikiotis, who wrote a book about his Greek and Jewish-Italian family in the Levant, said Jerusalem was home to at least 8,000 Greeks, in addition to those in trading ports like Jaffa. The statistics I obtained from the Greek Consulate in Jerusalem put the number higher from 1922, with almost 20,000 Greeks residing here. What can be stated with certainty is that a century ago, Greeks were a part of Jerusalem’s cosmopolitan fabric. In fact, by the early twentieth century, the community was blossoming so much that it had outgrown the Old City and established the Greek Colony between the present-day neighborhoods of Katamon and Baqa in upscale West Jerusalem. Fewer than 100 Greeks still live in Jerusalem, George told me. Since its founding, Israel has been arguably as intolerant as Atatürk’s Türkiye toward Christians, and as intolerant as Nasser’s Egypt toward the Greeks. In 1922, Christians accounted for twenty-three per cent of Jerusalem’s population. That was twenty-six years before the creation of the state of Israel. At the time of writing, they number barely two per cent, despite Jerusalem being home to at least six major churches. In Stratis Tsirkas’ World War II trilogy, Drifting Cities , Greeks jump off the pages of his main character, Manos’ sojourn in Jerusalem when it was part of mandatory Palestine. This is how one Greek resident of the city described the political maneuverings of Jerusalem’s communities during the early days of the Second World War: "Never mind the local authorities, the Allies, the Arabs and the Beduins, who all have their own organizations; never mind the Knights, the Protestants, the Catholics, the Armenians, the Russians, our own Greeks and all the missions who won’t stop at anything when it comes to winning souls ... it’s the Jews who are organized best. They’ve really set their minds to getting Palestine for themselves ... the Hagana, the Irgun, who collect the arms for after the war ... the Hadassah, who scoop up boatfuls of American dollars." Mathews uses the dwindling Greek communities of the Middle East to explore a changing regional order (Hurst) It was a rainy late-November afternoon. Samaras Cafe was drafty and our jackets were damp. The Near East is at its finest during winter when the olive-toned terrain is blanketed in grey and wet-cold. We devoured our hummus , labne and mutabbal , washing the assortment of mezze down with hot mint tea. “When the 1948 war started, the inhabitants of the Greek Colony fled the Jewish militias and took refuge at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. They crowded into the Old City for the Arab Legion to protect them. Everything you see here became part of Jordan,” George said, motioning out the window of the cafe to the bustling crowd outside. George spoke with an American accent. He had spent more than twenty years in the United States, where he told me he worked for Las Vegas star Wayne Newtown. I asked him whether he feels Greece advocates for its few remaining nationals here. “Athens doesn’t care about us. Most Greeks don’t even know we exist, so if we get destroyed, it won’t matter to the politicians,” he said. George, like many Greeks I met in the Middle East and Greece’s borderlands, believed the destruction of Greeks in Jerusalem is part of a subtler, centuries-old effort to Europeanise the Greek state and uproot them from the lands of Byzantium. This might sound far-fetched, but east of Thessaloniki it is widely believed. He told me: "We were the first nation-state in Europe. But Europe never wanted us to be independent. They were scared of a Greek democracy and our ambitions. The first thing they did was erase thousands of years of Roman and Byzantine history and telling us to be like ancient Greece. The same thing is going on here. Erasing the Greek presence." 'Europe never wanted us to be independent. They were scared of a Greek democracy and our ambitions' - George, Greek leader in Jerusalem George wanted to talk to me about the United States. He was flabbergasted by the Evangelicals’ rise within the Republican Party and their messianic support for Israeli settlement-building and annexation. “These people have hijacked the Republicans’ foreign policy on Israel,” he said. “I don’t understand what is going on. American Christians have abandoned the Christians here in Jerusalem: Greeks, Armenians and Palestinians. Do they realise what this Israeli government is allowing to happen to the Christians?” The Evangelicals’ diehard support for Israel’s expansion in the occupied Palestinian Territories is tied to their literal interpretation of Bible passages where God promises a homeland for the Jewish people and the so-called end-of-times prophecies. One strand of evangelical theology states that the end of the world will be ushered in when Jews return en masse to the Holy Land. After that, an Antichrist will come to earth and rule for seven years until this empire is destroyed in Armageddon. Then, Jesus Christ will return to earth and establish his Kingdom in Jerusalem. I was curious about the evangelical Christians myself. Tens of thousands come each year to visit the Holy Land. I asked George if they ever meet the Greeks or Palestinian Christians in the Old City. “They want nothing to do with us. We don’t see them at the church or at restaurants in the Christian Quarter. They have Jewish or American tour guides. Besides, the Israelis don’t want them to hear from us,” he said. “They go to the Jordan River to get baptised and outside the Old City,” he added. “Where they think Jesus was buried.” Evangelicals believe Jesus was buried at the Garden Tomb, which has become a major pilgrimage site for them. Other Christian denominations believe Jesus was crucified, buried and resurrected where the Church of the Holy Sepulchre sits in the Old City. Ghosts of Thessaloniki: How a quest for a table revealed much about a city's multilayered past Read More » Custodianship of the sprawling, cavernous church is shared among six denominations: Roman Catholics, Armenian Apostolics, Syrian Orthodox, Ethiopian Orthodox, Copts, and the most powerful of all, the Greek Orthodox. Saladin, the Muslim leader who conquered Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187, entrusted two prominent Sunni Muslim families with the keys to the church and the duty of opening and closing it each day. That tradition continues. It’s a good way to keep the Christians from killing each other. At times, bearded priests at the Holy Sepulchre get into fistfights over who has right of way in small corners of the church. I personally saw a group of Coptic and Greek priests get into a brouhaha over where a candle holder was placed. I walked to the Greek Colony a day before meeting George. It is now Greek in name only. It’s an oasis where bougainvillaea and pine trees spill out of Levantine gardens. The handsome limestone villas and apartment buildings that once housed Greeks were settled by Jewish refugees after 1948. I wanted to find the Lesky. This is the Greek club where the characters in Drifting Cities dance late into the night, drinking and listening to tango records. The club was built in 1902, in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire. It is made of Jerusalem limestone, with a red-tiled roof and painted shutters. It is set back in a verdant garden behind a wrought iron gate. When we arrived, the club was closed. I learned later from a Greek diplomat that the Greek community - fewer than 100 of them - were in a bitter dispute over the club and fighting over the keys. The Lesky’s status fit too well with the mood in half-occupied Jerusalem. Shuttered and unapproachable, it symbolised the withering Greek presence here. The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East by Sean Mathews is published by Hurst and is released on 11 December. Inside Israel Discover Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29 Update Date Override 0