There’s not much in English about the Orthodox Church during the Ottoman Empire so I was pleased when I saw that this book had been published. Archbishop Joseph Georgirenes ran afoul of the Ottoman authorities so left their territory and went to Rome, Marseilles, Paris and London. In England he published a booklet (in English) called ‘A Description of the Present State of Samos, Nicaria, Patmos and Mount Athos’ as English were curious about Orthodox Christianity. At the same time, he helped found the first Orthodox Church (in 1677) in the UK since the Schism. (The church was located in the suburb of Soho and that’s where the title ‘From Samos to Soho’ comes from. This traveling meant his life is better known than most Greek bishops of the time.
I enjoyed Chapter 7 about the manoeuvring to get the church built. Joseph did a lot of begging to raise the funds but the Anglican Archbishop of London started to set too many conditions (no icons, denial of the Synod of Jerusalem). Modern Anglicans make a lot of fuss about this first church to prove how welcoming and tolerant they were. What is often neglected is that the Anglicans confiscated the church and handed it over to French Protestants in 1682. There wouldn’t be another Orthodox Church in the UK until 1720 when an Orthodox Chapel was set up in the Russian Embassy established by Peter the Great. The church building was demolished in the 19th century but the dedicatory inscription was saved and placed in the Greek Orthodox Cathedral on Moscow Road. I always wondered what it said so I was happy that John Penrose Barron provides a translation of it (pp 177-78).
I was a bit disappointed that Joseph's treatise was just a poor photocopy of the original 17th century booklet. It basically made it unreadable due to the archaic font and layout and rather fuzzy text. You can get a better copy online as a pdf from archive websites. It really needed to be transcribed into a modern readable font. I did appreciate a translation of the dedication (pp. 231-32) as the original is in Greek even though the rest of the booklet is in English.
Eventually anti-Catholic sentiment drove Joseph Georgirenes from England. John Penrose Barron’s research has discovered that Georgirenes wanderings led him to South America. I found this information fairly interesting as I hadn’t heard it before.
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Top reviews from other countries
Stefano Nikolaou
A Greek bishop in England
Reviewed in Australia on February 2, 2024