American International Journal of Social Science

The Worship of Saints in Greece between Popular Religion and Local Identity: A Case Study
M. G. VARVOUNIS

Abstract
In this paper we examine the contemporary conflict between the people of the Greek islands Samos and Kephallenia, about the cult of three saints of the 4th c. As part of the misconstruing of the hagiological texts regarding the saints, masses have been published and it has been maintained in a series of popularizing articles in newspapers that these saints are exclusively tied to Kephallenia. This has occurred, moreover, despite the fact that the worship of the three saints returned to Samos as early as 1996, on the initiative of Eusebios, Metropolitan of Samos and Ikaria. At the same time, in 2007, a church dedicated to the three military saints was built on Samos, whose inhabitants honour them as an indivisible part of Samian religious folk tradition. These adventures, so to speak, of the saints that have occurred in the Greece of today indicate the existence of an excessive piety, in that they show how historical research can suffer badly from localism of every kind. In any case, the three saints, in addition to the fact that as saints they are to be held in honour by all the faithful, belong both to Samos, where they were hermits and worked miracles through their relics, and to Kephallenia, where their relics rested for some time, on their way to Venice and where they also worked miracles. All other types of exclusiveness, so to speak, do not form part of the remit of academic research. Rather, they form the problems that characterise current religious life and pastoral practice in religious life in Greece today.

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