The Patriarch

Istanbul's million and a half Moslems, Christians and Jews go about their business among ancient ruins, aqueducts, walls and cisterns that are dead relics of Byzantium's glory. But Istanbul's strongest link with the past is very much alive: looming (6 ft.-4 in.), white-bearded Athenagoras I, 67, the 268th Ecumenical Patriarch of the Orthodox Church.

Last week Athenagoras observed his fifth anniversary in a job in which his predecessor went mad.* His power in matters of faith, order and polity is far more limited than that of the Pope; yet he is looked upon as "Elder Brother" by the churches of Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, Russia,. Cyprus, Greece, Bulgaria, ATHENAGORAS I On a wooden throne, a nylon ruler.

Serbia, Rumania, Georgia, Poland and Albania. His concern encompasses some 200 million souls.

"Be Friends." "Now we have a nylon Patriarch," said the Turks when Athenagoras, just back from 18 years in the U.S.,' ascended the 1,000-year-old wooden throne in Istanbul's Phanari Cathedral (TIME, Nov. 15, 1948). Born a Turkish subject in a village near the Greek-Albanian border, Aristoklis Spyrou was appointed in 1919 to the Metropolitan Church of Athens. In 1930 the Orthodox population of the New World, a diocese of the Istanbul Patriarchate, needed a steady hand and a good brain to untangle a snarl of jealousy and intrigue into which the church had fallen, Aristoklis Spytbu, now Athenagoras, was the answer. He became archbishop primate of North and South America, and eventually gave up the Greek citizenship he had acquired to become a U.S. citizen.

What Athenagoras brought to Istanbul from the U.S. was a passion for intergroup harmony. He saw that the antique antagonism between Turk and Greek, Moslem and Christian was a menace to the City of God as well as the City of Man, and he dedicated himself to ending it.

Over and over, he stressed democratic harmony rather than unbending orthodoxy: "Get together. Be friends. Advance toward one goal--freedom of thought, freedom of belief, freedom of action."

Now a Turkish citizen again, Athenagoras has worked hard to make friends with Turkey's leading politicians. He visited the Turkish director of the Hagia Sophia Museum--the first time an Ecumenical Patriarch had set foot within that 6th century shrine of Christendom since it was captured by the Turks in 1453. This was his "wordless answer" to both the extreme Moslems who want it converted to a mosque and the extreme Orthodox who clamor for its reconversion to a church. To newsmen who plagued him for an explanation, he said: "In the time of Byzantium, Hagia Sophia was open to all. Today, as a museum, it is again open to all."

Polyglot See. The principal entrance to the grounds of Istanbul's patriarchate is a door that is never opened. Before it, in 1822 the Ecumenical Patriarch Gregorius V was hanged on the orders of Sultan Mahmoud II, who accused him of conspiring with the Greeks in a revolt against the Ottoman Empire. For generations, the Closed Door was an Orthodox shrine to the ancient enmity. Under Athenagoras, the door is still closed, but now, as an Orthodox official recently explained: "The Closed Door is a memorial for a dead Patriarch, not a reminder of the way he died."

Hard-working Athenagoras labors long hours to keep up with the affairs of his polyglot see (he speaks Greek, Turkish, English. French, Russian and Spanish), sleeping and eating little, making himself accessible to almost anyone who wants to see him. He maintains close contact with his old friends in the U.S., among them ex-President Harry Truman. Even his sharpest critics acknowledge that his political sense has accomplished much for Greek-Turkish relations. Says one of them: "Athenagoras is not essentially an ecclesiast or a scholar. He is a religio-politician. But I must admit that he is a man of great vision."

Perhaps neither political know-how nor vision is enough to account for the power and popularity of this Patriarch. When he drives through the tortuous streets of old Istanbul in the black Cadillac presented him by his Hollywood friend, Filmagnate Spyros Skouras, policemen all along his route come to salute. A reporter once asked one of them whether this was an official order.

"Why, no," answered the cop. "I greet him because it gives me pleasure to greet him, and especially to see his benevolent smile."

* Maximos V (57), who was retired to a sinecure in 1948.

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