TEXTS IN ENGLISH

BEGINNINGS

RTE: George, please tell us about your background and how you began this epic project of reconstructing St. Andrew’s journeys.

GEORGE: Yes, but before I begin, I have to say that at certain times in my life I’ve been very blind. I can speak about the Taliban, about international policy, about government leaders, but I’m not righteous enough to speak or
write about St. Andrew. This is how I feel and I must say so at the beginning. My background is that I went to the university as one of the best students in Greece, but dropped out to become a hippie and a traveler, a fighter for
the ecological movement, and then just an “easy rider.” When I returned to Greece, by chance, or perhaps God’s will, I turned to journalism and was quite successful. I became the director of an important Greek historical
journal, had a rather flashy career in Cyprus as a TV news director, and traveled around the world for some major journalist associations. I worked freelance in many media, but finally understood that this was not exactly how I wanted to live my life.

Since then, I married, had two children, lost my health, and over the past few years have done a lot of thinking. Now, I’m with the Voice of Greece, broadcasting a weekly radio news show to Greeks and Greek-speakers world-wide. It’s a very diverse audience including Greeks in the diaspora, Greek-speaking Russian Orthodox monks in Siberia, Pakistani immigrants who learned Greek here and have now returned to Pakistan, scholars of ancient Greek who want to hear the modern Greek language, and so on. Foremost, however, I’m a traveler and I travel still. I like to feel the essence of people all over the world.

RTE: I remember that you once told me you have come across many small unrelated ethnic groups who believed they were descendants of Alexander the Great.

GEORGE: Yes. In my own way, I’m a specialist in this. I’ve met people all over the world who claim to be of Greek ancestry. They may trace their heritage from the ancient Greeks, Byzantines, or modern Greeks, but they all claim to be Greek. It’s very strange, you pick up a stone in any part of the world and underneath you’ll find a Greek. We have descendants of ancient Greeks in Calabria (southern Italy), the Crimea, and the whole Black Sea region. This is from the Greco-Roman world. Then, we have the legacy of Alexander the Great in central Asia, in India, in Sudan, in Egypt, in Iraq, in Armenia, even in the Taklimakan Desert in Niya (China). It isn’t we Greeks who claim this; these people themselves have a long tradition that they are Greek. For instance, some leaders of the remote Araucan tribes of Chile claim that they are descended from the ancient Spartans (and they certainly didn’t learn about the Spartans from history books). There are even central Africans who claim to be descendants of Alexander the Great’s soldiers or the Ptolemaic Greeks.
Through the Ptolemaic Greeks, we also have a connection with Indonesia. During the Ptolemaic period, the Indonesians were very great travelers and sailed the Indian and Pacific Oceans for distances like that of Cardiff to New
York. Greeks, Arabs and Indonesians all traveled to Tanzania.

You find Greek faces in strange places all over the world. There are descendants of Greek-Chinese in Niya, China’s Sinkiang region, as I said, and there was a Greek-Chinese kingdom in today’s Uzbekistan. For a time I was a scholar of Greco-Buddhism, which has a very strong legacy in central Asia, and there you can trace the origins of Buddhism’s transformation from a philosophical practice to a world religion through the descendants of Greeks from the time of Alexander the Great in Greco-Indian Gandhara, in northwest India.
I’ve also investigated descendants of the Byzantine Greeks, who, in eastern lands under the Turks, were called Rum-Orthodox, meaning “Roman” Orthodox, as Constantinople was the New Rome: the Rum-Orthodox of Palestine, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, the Rum-patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem – and also the Catholic uniates of the Middle East who claim to be descendants of Byzantine Greeks who guarded the Byzantine Emperor and call
themselves Greek-Catholics.
People journeyed over vast areas in antiquity and we know quite a lot about their travels. For instance, Claudius Ptolemy drew a map of the ancient world in the second century after Christ (and this is a real map of the world as we know it today). From Ptolemy and other Hellenistic geographers and historians we know that there were extensive trade routes such as the Silk Road, the Cinnamon Road, the Spice Road, the Golden Road from the Kingdom of Zimbabwe to the Mediterranean Sea, and the Amber Road from the Baltic Sea to Rome, through Denmark and the British Isles. The Verangian Road (as it was called by the Byzantines) was traveled by Herodotus 1,400 years ago, and went from the Crimea through Kiev, straight to Valaamo and the Baltic Sea. Centuries earlier it was called the Dneper Road. There was another major route connecting the Mediterranean to Cornwall in the British Isles, the Tin or Pewter Road. Then we had the famous Silk Route, which united the Chinese Han Empire with Rome. There was also a trade route along the Nile between Meroe and Axum, the kingdoms of Sudan and Ethiopia. The Cinnamon Road connected Shanghai in China with Indonesia and Borneo, through Java to Tanzania. The Spice Road united China through Burma, Sri Lanka and present-day Pakistan to the Red Sea. You can imagine, these were all important routes and a simple, unostentatious man like St. Andrew could take any of them easily.

RTE: Were the ancient and classical maps more accurate than later medieval maps in the West?

GEORGE: Yes, later Christians would say, “Paradise was here, the earth was flat, etc.,” but if you look at the old Greek maps, they not only knew the earth was round, but the longitudes and latitudes are the same on their maps as we know them today. They are not exactly the same because we count ours from Greenwich and they didn’t, but you can correlate them precisely. You can even find America and Australia on some maps (i.e. the map of Crates the Maleot in 150 B.C.). This is why I believe we can accurately locate these places from the old traditions. When barbaric peoples invaded the older Christian civilizations and became Christian themselves, this was right spiritually, but it was a catastrophe for civilization. Night fell on education and learning, although spiritually and culturally it was a dawn for the barbarians. It was their time, for the first time in history.

RTE: Although there were dangers from bandits and smugglers, there probably weren’t the kind of border controls we have now.

GEORGE: Yes, but even now there are dangers. Going to Siberia isn’t any safer now than it was 2,000 years ago, but there was often another attitude towards travelers then. Although there were always dangers, in many ancient cultures a traveler was sacred, he was from far away and people didn’t want to despoil him; they wanted to hear about his country and his civilization. You didn’t need visas, documents, you were not even in need of friends because you were a special person, a traveler. You were coming with far-off ideas, different beliefs, strange dress. You were more often a person to admire than someone to fight or to steal from. In the ancient world passing
travelers were laden with gifts – this was Marco Polo’s experience. Those were different times. With my own decades of traveling to difficult and exotic places, it is easy for me to understand how St. Andrew could have traveled
as extensively as the traditions recount.

RTE: When we first spoke about your research you made the remark that when the Lord told the apostles to preach the gospel to the ends of the earth, they did not think this meant their descendants. They took this literally.

GEORGE: Yes, we have many written traditions from the second and third centuries A.D. that the apostles went to Middle Asia, to sub-Saharan Africa, to India, even to old Burma. They went to the land of Sogdiana, which is modern Uzbekistan/western China… we had all these memories and traditions of the first years of Christianity, but we thought they were just strange tales. Now, with the help of archeology, we understand that these roads did exist, and that many, many people took them. We know, for example, that the Indonesians were traveling from Java to Tanzania across the Indian ocean. They had large, well-balanced outrigger canoes, and they would load them with their families, livestock, food and water, and set out from Java – sometimes traveling for a lifetime. This is how they discovered Madagascar. They sailed the open oceans without any fear. The Celts also were extensive travelers in the North Atlantic with their leather-covered boats, the curraghs. Another example of widespread travel is that in 330 B.C., Pithias knew northern Europe well. He had been to Cornwall, to Scotland, to Thule (some say that ancient Thule was Iceland, others Greenland, others Northern Scandinavia) and from there he traveled to Marseilles in forty-five days.

RTE: In forty-five days!

GEORGE: Yes. And in Claudius Ptolemy’s (100-170 A.D.) geography we have Diogenes – a second Diogenes, not the philosopher – who, during the apostolic times, left by ship from Alexandria and went to Azania, present-day
Tanzania, to a place called Rapta. From Tanzania he walked for twenty-five days to the mountains of Ruvenzori between Lake Albert and Lake Edward in what is now Rwanda, Uganda, Congo-Zaire. You see, it was a small world
at that time, and the Greeks already knew the source of the Nile. So, when the Lord told the apostles to go to the ends of the earth, the Greco-Roman knowledge of the world at that time was quite specific. They knew where the ends of the earth were. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, the world ended in an abyss, the “Antipodes,” after the Prasum Promentory in Zimbabwe. However, the ancient Israelites, the Himyarite Arabs, Phoenicians, and Nabbataean Arabs knew that this was not the final abyss, but the dzimba dza mabwe, possibly the mines of King Solomon, or the Bantu Empire of Monomotapa (Mwene Muntapa).
My point is that, geographically, Ptolmey gave us all the known places and no one can say that this is rubbish. China, Indonesia, Lapland, Britain, Scandinavia were all known. It was not easy to go to the ends of the earth, but it was possible. In his epistles, St. Paul speaks of being obliged to spread the gospel or he will be lost. In Greek, these words, “to the ends of the earth” are very precise, they are in no sense allegorical and the apostles would have
understood this literally. The ancient geographers used this phrase as a precise geographical definition. That the apostles accomplished this to some degree is borne out by the Church historian Tertullian, who wrote in 170 A.D.: “We have deacons, we have priests and we have churches, to the ends of the earth.”1 Then he describes the places: the Sarmatians, Sub-Saharan Africa, the British Isles, and the Scythians. The territory of the Sarmatians, for instance, stretched from the Caspian Sea to Lake Baikal; and from Mongolia to Siberia.

THE CROSS OF THE NORTH

RTE: How did you begin to write about St. Andrew in particular?

GEORGE: If you had told me a year ago that I would be writing a book on St. Andrew, I would have said you were crazy. I never imagined that I would do such a thing. But when I had some serious problems, I went to New Valaamo Monastery in Finland where I was given the extremely kind hospitality of the monks and Igumen Sergei. It was like entering the doors of paradise.
You can imagine; it was cold, quiet, silent, and the only things I had to face were God, nature, and myself. At the time I wanted to write a book about the Kalash, the descendants of Alexander the Great on the northwest border of Pakistan, who are still pagan. Their religion is still very connected with ancient Greek paganism, and I feel an urgency to preserve their mythology and legends because this is an endangered culture and there are only two thousand of them left. I had planned to begin this work in Finland, but I understood that the monastery was not exactly a proper place to write about pagans… so instead I began writing about the Karelian Orthodox saints. I was impressed that many Greek monks from Mt. Athos had gone to Karelia and that Karelian monks had gone to Mt. Athos and later returned to the Russian north – like St. Arseny of Konevits. One of our Greeks who went to Karelia was Monk Eliezar, and we have had a continual stream of Greek monks, hermits and ascetics in Karelia. Tradition says of Sts. Sergius and Herman, the founders of Valaam Monastery in Russia, that one was a Greek from Mt. Athos and the other a local Karelian. (Others say they were both Greeks from Kiev, and a third version holds that one was Greek and the other a pagan priest, but the fact remains that in each variant they had Greek influence and ideas.)
I am fascinated by what I call “The Cross of the North.” This is a geographical cross that you can trace on a map. The vertical bar links the far north of Russia to Greek Orthodoxy in the south. The crossbar connects Finnish, Russian and American Orthodoxy, from Sts. Sergius and Herman of Valaam, through the deserts of the “Northern Thebaid” to St. Herman of Alaska on Spruce Island.
I was thrilled to be at Valaamo, receiving the tradition of Valaam Monastery and writing about the saints. The abbot helped us very much. My wife is Ukrainian, a Russian national, and we were given access to the monastery archives and allowed to copy anything we liked. This was a very great gift of God and of Valaamo. We translated from many books and then came back to Greece to begin writing. Even then I knew that I must begin by writing the life of St. Andrew the Apostle.

RTE: The tradition that St. Andrew was in Karelia is still held today?

GEORGE: Yes, by the monks of Old Valaam Monastery in Russia, some monks of New Valaamo in Finland, and by Finnish and Russian Karelians as well. St. Andrew is at the center of the icon, “Synaxis of All the Saints of Valaam” at New Valaamo Monastery. As I began to write, I found myself coming across more and more scattered information about St. Andrew from all over the world. Finally, my Greek editor, Sophia Oriphanidou, said, “Wait on the lives of the saints of Karelia, write first about St. Andrew himself.” I didn’t feel right working on a book about an apostle, but I told myself, “Yes, I’m a very bad guy, but it happens that I have to write this book, so I will.” It was an inner obligation that I knew I couldn’t avoid. I’m not worthy to write about him, but I had to, and I ask everyone to forgive me.
Once I began, many sources came to me and people came forward to help, from northern Russia, central Asia, eastern Europe, Ethiopia – texts and oral traditions, even from the Kalash people of Pakistan, whom I mentioned
earlier. Their texts speak of the presence of a messenger from God by the name of Indrein, and I cite this tradition in my book in their local language, because in the old Romanian, St. Andrew is called Indrean. I collected
many local traditions, everything I could find. At first it was very difficult, but then things began coming.

RTE: You said earlier that it was as if they were being put in your way.

GEORGE: Yes, but at the beginning it was chaos, just scattered information from around the world. Also, I knew that I didn’t want to make traditions out of legends. I just wanted to follow the sources and see where they led; it was like putting a huge puzzle together. I have already covered about a thousand pages and I quote almost fifty languages and dialects. The book is in Greek, of course, and I’m calling it, “He Raised the Cross on the Ice.”

RTE: What languages did you work in?

GEORGE: The oral traditions and texts referring to St Andrew are in ancient Greek, modern Greek, Pontian and Calabrian Greek, Georgian, Abhazian, Slavonic, Serbian, Russian, Ukrainian, Romanian, Kalasha, Baganda, Kurdish, Ethiopian Geez, Ethiopian Amharic, Coptic, Arabic, Aramaic Syrian, Turkish, Turcik of Central Asia, Iranian, Bulgarian, old English, English, German, Italian, Latin, Albanian, Finnish, Karelian, Armenian, and many dialects. I also had to deal with many languages, scripts and dialects, living and extinct, that didn’t deal directly with St. Andrew, because I had to read the sources concerning the world in which he lived. These were in Hebrew, Samaritan, Bantu, Kushitic, Teso, San, Tokharian, Sanskrit, Chinese, Mongolian, Korean, Amazigh-Berberic, Gothic, Gaelic, Saami-Lappish, Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Tadjik, Sogdian, and so on. Of course, I wasn’t able to learn all these languages, but I was fortunate enough to find native speakers and scholars around the world to help me with these sources. And here I have to thank my wife and spiritual sister Olga, because her help with the Slavic sources was fundamental for my research. Megas Farantos, the well-known professor of dogmatic theology in Greece and Germany, who represents the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Greek Church in dialogue with the Roman Catholics and other religions, was a great help to me. He trusts my work and academically supports me. He told me, “Don’t critique the traditions, this is not your job. Accept them or don’t accept them, but don’t critique them.” Secondly, he said, “Adopt a principle of work-ing. They can fight your interpretation, but not your principle.”
So, I took as a principle the premise that, “I accept all evidence as possible, whether it is a writing of the Holy Fathers, an oral tradition from Uzbekistan, a Coptic text from Ethiopia, a simple dream, or the archeological excavations of a Chinese scholar.” It is impossible from our time to absolutely say that a certain isolated tradition is true or false. My idea was to work from another direction by putting down all the scattered sources to see if the different traditions of St. Andrew’s journeys fit together geographically and time-wise. I wanted to see if they were even possible. Then, once I exposed the contradictions, perhaps I could find the actual routes of St. Andrew’s journeys. The question was if, by setting the various traditions side-by-side, I could trace St. Andrew’s travels with any probability. Our strongest evidence, and what we always hoped for, was early written commentary about the apostle’s visit to an area along with a separate, verified oral tradition from the same place that has been passed down until now. As I went on, I discovered that in time and geography the Kazakhstani tradition fit the Sogdiana tradition (modern Uzbekistan), the Sogdiana tradition fit into the Parthian tradition (Persia) and the Parthian tradition fit the Syriac tradition. It was like a train, one car after another, until I had only twenty years missing from St. Andrew’s return to the Black Sea from Valaamo until he went to Sinope – and from there to Patras in Achaia, to his martyrdom.

RTE: Were you able to resolve those twenty years?

GEORGE: Yes, I found a local Romanian tradition that St. Andrew lived twenty years in a cave in Romania, in Dervent, and during this time he traveled through what is now Romania, Bulgaria and Moldavia. But the most incredible
thing was that, according to the early Romanian traditions, the years he was there was the exact period I was missing from the other traditions. The most important thing is that these puzzle pieces – the separate local traditions of Bulgaria, Romania, Ethiopia, of the Aramaic people, the Syrians, the Copts, even the Greek and Roman church traditions all fit together, but you have to follow them step by step to recreate his life.
Finally, I had only one piece that I couldn’t fit, even as a possibility: the Declaration of Arbroath, the fourteenth-century Scottish declaration of independence from England which says that the Scots were taught the Christian faith by St. Andrew himself. Historians dismiss this, but I have to point out that his presence there was not physically impossible.