Archive note: This text comes from the old archive of Nomika Epilekta and is preserved with care for historical and informational reading.

Every day the unfitness of very many public functionaries and employees is confirmed; they ought to be practicing different honest occupations, such as herdsmen, fishermen, cultivators of the land, seamen, sanitation workers, merchant tailors and others. They should not possess even a crumb of state authority, because they are not in a position to exercise functions that require responsibility, special abilities, specific qualifications, specialized knowledge and grey matter inside their cranial cavity, which as a rule is empty. And above all they should have ethos, honesty, humanity, social experience and shame.

In our blessed country there is chiefly a lack of common sense, ability, training, cultivation, principles and ideological orientation, because of which public functionaries and the various employees and agents who exercise authority almost daily disgrace us to the ends of the world. Without pangs of conscience, without consequences for their profane acts and, of course, without shame, which tends to disappear altogether. With this introduction we enter the main subject of the pretrial detention of the abbot of the famous and ancient Vatopedi Monastery, which, like a bolt from the blue, disturbed the already tormented, saddened and oppressed Greek society. It also disturbed foreigners, enemies and friends alike. It strengthened the enemies in their hostility toward us, and turned friends into enemies who wonder why they were ever our friends. Friends of a people that tolerates being governed by political fraudsters, endures a judicial mechanism of injustice and inhumanity that is in incurable aphasia, and does not protest against the brutal things happening around it, but rises up only when the privileges and unjust safeguards of its guild are questioned. The media intensify the announcements and sad news of the continuing increase in tax burdens and the flight of robust businesses to Turkey and the other countries of the Balkan surrounding region. They report the closing of commercial stores, spreading poverty in all social classes and, above all, the weaker income groups. They report the mutual slaughter among professional politicians over who will seize the ladle, and the legislatively guaranteed impunity of political embezzlers. At the same moment when disappointment and uncertainty about the present and the future tighten around us, we learn that an investigating judge decided to imprison Abbot Ephraim, precisely on the eve of Christmas and contrary to the opinion that came from the prosecutor, who favored imposing “restrictive conditions” against him, lest he escape the harsh fate that the judicial mechanism reserves for its numerous victims, who, whenever they are vindicated after endless suffering, are compensated with the borrowed money of international “usurers” and not from the property of the culpable and inadequate judges whom we feed. The imprisonment of the elderly abbot was decided by the lady in question in order to confirm her colleague, the former president of the Areios Pagos, distinguished in the capacity of political columnist, who in his recent angry article of 17.12.2011 informs us that justice is in aphasia, “Justice in aphasia”. Every sensible citizen wonders: What suddenly intervened, after so many years of inertia, for them to throw into the medieval prisons of our devalued country an elderly monk, an abbot with international visibility, who had just returned from the great country of the same faith, Russia, where he was received even by the top Russian leaders, the president and the prime minister of the Russian Federation? With what reasoning did the backstage political operators, and whatever other cretins, decide to load their transgressions onto the aged shoulders of the abbot? Can they not understand what the least citizen understands, that by displaying such harshness and baseness the entire Greek people is exposed and our country is disgraced as a country of miserable little human beings, homunculi, who have neither sacred nor holy things? Neither the appellate judge nor her environment has the right to disgrace our country and each one of us, trying to demonstrate their folly and irresponsibility while fortified behind capacities that belong to others, to the capable and gifted. A prosecutor of first instance, so that we should have no doubt that the judicial power functions in our country, accompanied by the police director of Chalkidiki, hurried to implement the decision of the members of the judicial council who vindicated their colleague in her decision not to let the elder escape, since he does not have the guarantees of the Germans, that is, he has no relation to Siemens and its employees. The prosecutor with the police director and an escort, custodia, while the Nativity of Christ was awaited, amid the sounds of bells and the chants of the hermits of Mount Athos, profaning the day and the sacred place, a bulwark of Orthodoxy with worldwide radiance, arrested the abbot and, as the media joyfully inform us, “activated the arrest warrant”. The representatives of executive and judicial power arrested the helpless elder, who suffers from an infection, diabetes, has a high fever and is bedridden, in order to transfer him “safely” to the hell of the prisons for defendants awaiting trial. There, the elderly, the young, the sick and the helpless taste hell in advance, waiting to be convicted because they had the misfortune to become entangled in the mechanisms of merciless state power. The power that Christ judged and condemned through His divine teaching. The role of Pontius Pilate was assumed by Archbishop Ieronymos, who, instead of showing his opposition to the maneuvers, stated in a subdued tone that he does not know the substance of the case and respects Greek justice. Yet he is “particularly troubled, as indeed every Christian is, by the timing of the issuance of the order for pretrial detention of the abbot of the Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi, Ephraim, on Christmas Day. And let him who understands, understand”. It was made clear, however, that there is no Greek justice, just as there is no German, French or other justice. Justice is one as a concept and as an aspiration. There is judicial power, which is Greek, German, French or other power. This power is judged, must be judged and must be condemned when it acts unlawfully. With passion, force and determination. So that we may leave the Middle Ages and adapt to our time, to the 21st century. Respect is not bestowed upon unlawful, provocative and inhuman actions. We respect morality and true justice. We disapprove and condemn the maneuvers and inhuman actions of anti-Christian power. In the same way, we disapprove of opportunists. The condemnations, the disgrace and the unceasing negative comments of Westerners were not enough for us. Now we have also coordinated Easterners to condemn us as savage and inhuman. The Patriarchate of Moscow characterized the decision to imprison the abbot with the phrase that it is an act of “unprecedented savagery”. Similar characterizations against us came from other ecclesiastical and political figures. The members of the judicial council and the investigating judge achieved what corrupt politicians had not managed. They succeeded in harmonizing East and West against our country. A great bravo belongs to them. They fulfilled their mission. Against our country and our people. Let them sleep calmly and blissfully and, when they are offended, let them strike… We dedicate to them the words of the representative of the Russian Church, Igor Yakimchuk: “It is an unprecedented event and it is natural that we are concerned. Even if we suppose that Elder Ephraim is guilty of something, the arrest of the abbot of a monastery, of a monk, is an excessive measure”. And we add: The pretrial detention of the monk on the eve of Christmas 2011, as well as any pretrial detention for property offences, is an inhuman measure imposed by authority against those who do not have the right connections and protectors. Against the weak by the powerful, who failed to approach the message of Christmas. They prefer darkness and the shadow of death to the radiance of the star of Bethlehem, which leads us to new bright roads. Roads of love and humanity.