March 25, 1821

Message of Salvation of Humanity and Freedom of Hellenism

Orthodoxy and Hellenism rejoice and celebrate. March 25th dawns. A day that marks the Freedom of man. Man is freed from the bonds of sin and the Greek acquires his Freedom. The Annunciation of the Most Holy Theotokos and the beginning of the struggle of '21 for Freedom are celebrated by Hellenism everywhere on earth.

The archangel Gabriel, by command of God the Father, conveys to our Virgin Mary the joyful message: she will become the mother of God, our Christ, the second person of the Holy Trinity. In the obscure city of Nazareth, the moment of the fulfillment of God's promise to the human race comes to the then 15-year-old Mary. At the moment of the exodus of the first-born from paradise, our Creator gave a message of redemption for fallen man (protoevangelium). Addressing the archaic devil in the form of a serpent, he said, “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Gen. 3:15). My only begotten Son will crush the kingdom of the devil’s sin and darkness. He will be born of a virgin. Light, Life and Truth will triumph. Our God fulfills this promise. Our Creator always fulfills his promises. God is a liar, may He not be!! The Archangel conveys to the humble servant of God the joyful news that she will become the mother of the Son of God, in a miraculous way. The All-Pure Virgin Mary accepts the news with great humility, saying “Behold the Handmaid of the Lord, be it unto me according to your word.” Simply and humbly. Without egoism and pretensions. The eternal will and plan of God for the salvation of the human race is put into practice. The Son of God takes on flesh and bones and through the pure blood of our Virgin Mary is born as a man in the cave of the horses and begins the “work of the Divine economy.” The Son of God becomes a perfect man, without sin, the son of the ever-virgin Virgin Mary. What an honor for the female sex. At the same time, He is also God, perfect and true.

With the Archangel's "Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you," comes the joyful news to mankind, the so-called annunciation of the Theotokos. A greeting that surprised little Mary, who hesitated at the presence of the Archangel, fearing that what she was seeing was some diabolical action, some temptation that would distance her from God. However, the words that followed reassured her, despite the unexpected message and the reasonable question they caused her: "and how can this be to me, since I am a stranger?" The Archangel, who could not explain the mystery himself, only replied that the supernatural message would be fulfilled by the Grace of the Holy Spirit: "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you." Where God wills, the natural order is defeated.

The choice of the Virgin Mary was not accidental. The child of elderly parents who was born after many prayers and whom her elderly parents had ordered to dedicate to God. She was the purest, the most humble and guileless daughter. There has not been and will not be such a woman in the world. She was chosen by God to bring His only begotten Son into the world, to save the human race from sin with His death on the cross and His three-day Resurrection.

Our ancestors also chose this day, March 25, in 1821 to send a joyful message to the enslaved peoples of the world. They said, “Rejoice, O Joy, Freedom.” Four hundred years enslaved and enslaved to the Turkish tyrant. Four hundred years for Hellenism to have the Ottomans on its neck. To suffer the worst. He is a slave, he is a slave and does not control his land nor the honor of his family nor his life. He cannot learn elementary letters, his language, which created a vast civilization and gave rise to lofty concepts such as democracy and freedom or erected Parthenons and conquered the world with the civilizing Macedonian Alexander the Great. It is not possible to worship the one and true God. He accepts pressure to change his faith, he refuses to submit. Thus we have a large number, a cloud of named and anonymous Saints. The New Martyrs as our Holy Church called them.

He resorts to the secret school to learn a few letters. Not to forget his History, Salamis, Thermopylae, Alexander the Great and many others. There, in the trembling light of the oil lamp, according to the poet, he learns what he had, what he has, what he should have and remains a Greek. He studies a few kollyvograms from the octave and the psalter. He is also nursed in the teachings of Orthodoxy. There are, unfortunately, a few deniers of the secret school, the admirers of the theory that the Pontians and Asia Minor were not massacred by the Turks, they simply died of suffocation due to overcrowding. They deny the existence of the secret school. They are too few to make us deniers of historical truth.

The sufferings are many and the life of the enslaved Greeks is hard. Within them smolders the desire for Freedom. The hope of liberation. The international environment is extremely hostile, Metternich with the Holy Alliance a great obstacle. The Greek, nurtured with the hope that "it will be ours again", does not sit with his arms crossed, he organizes and rebels. We have local uprisings that drown in blood, but they feed the hope for freedom with faith. These attempts are numerous. The blood and bodies of the sacrificed become fertilizer to nourish the desire for freedom. The armatolos and the thieves, the folk songs and the thourios of Rigas Feraios - how long will we lads live in the narrow streets, alone like lions on the stones in the mountains. Better an hour of free life than forty years of slavery and prison; they give courage and strength to the enslaved Greek race. The Friendly Society helps prepare for the great moment. It organizes, coordinates, directs. It works methodically and secretly. The tyrant lurks. He does not want to lose Greece, he wants it to be a slave and enslaved, like other peoples. He wants to preserve the powerful, as he believed, Ottoman Empire intact. The enslaved Greek longs for his Freedom and no one can deprive him of it. He is determined to shed his blood and even offer his life for his homeland, faith and freedom.

The longed-for, holy and blessed day has arrived. It is March 25, 1821. In Kalavryta, the bishop of Paleon Patras Germanos raises the flag of the revolution and the festival of rebirth begins. For the Holy Faith of Christ and for the freedom of Greece, the struggle is being waged. The general uprising began with the faith in Christ on the day of the Annunciation. The “rejoice, O Most Gracious One” is complemented by the “rejoice, oh joy, freedom”.

The great fighter and hero of the 21st, Theodoros Kolokotronis, the Elder of Morea, thunders “God signed the freedom of Greece and does not take His signature back”. May it not be. Some claim that the uprising of the Greeks was influenced by the so-called French Revolution. Really, our friends the French, which conqueror and foreign and foreign-religious tyrant did they want to expel and the revolutionaries declared that this was done for “the holy faith of Christ”? I have not found anything like that anywhere. It is just that the French Revolution preceded it in time.

In this struggle, everyone gave a strong and thunderous presence. Young, old, rich, poor, literate and illiterate, women and men. Everyone wanted their freedom. Clergy and laity, islanders and mainlanders competed to see who would offer the most. Their best self, their being, their blood and their life. Many clergy, ordinary priests, metropolitans and patriarchs watered the tree of freedom with their blood. There are clerical heroes such as Papaflessas, Athanasios Diakos, Isaiah Salonon, Patriarch Gregory the Fifth, as well as laymen, e.g. Plapoutas, Kanaris, Makrygiannis, to name a few. It is not possible to mention all the names in the context of one article. The folk muse with folk songs, tradition and history has recorded many, I believe not all. All of them, whether named or anonymous, contributed to the liberation of our homeland. Many foreigners also helped this effort, motivated by love for Greece, its culture and its enormous contribution to the world spirit.

Drunk in the victorious struggle of the early years, they probably forgot that the liberation of the place did not take place and the captains began to quarrel and fight among themselves, to fight against each other. The eternal scourge of the tribe. Egoism and greed. The tyrant found an opportunity and recaptured many fortresses. A dark page, obviously very instructive. We can offer, everywhere, without seeming to be first. The essence counts and not the type, the appearance.

God, indeed, put his signature, according to the saying of Kolokotronis, and our homeland was liberated. Not entirely. Other struggles and other wars and heroes were needed to create the current borders of our homeland.

I would like to close with the poet's verses "get drunk with the immortal wine of '21" and I would add the minimum "and with the immortal wine of Orthodoxy".

“Hail, full of grace, Mary, the Lord is with you”

"Better one hour of free life than forty years of slavery and prison”

The article was written by Panagiotis Myrgiotis, a mathematician.