Theophany in San Stefano, 1848

I meant to post this on Theophany, but wasn't able to because of time. As you know, I'm interested in the South, the Middle East, Orthodoxy, and where they occasionally meet. The following passage(s) are from "Turkey and its destiny," by the Englishman Charles Macfarlane, who traveled to the Ottoman Empire several times during the 19th century. In January of 1848 Macfarlane paid a visit to one of the few Americans then residing in Turkey, Dr. James Bolton Davis of South Carolina. Davis had contracted with Sultan Abdul Mejid to introduce the American method of cotton cultivation to Turkey. Davis established a model farm at San Stefano - a village at the time about 11km from Constantinople - that he staffed with four emancipated slaves that had formerly belonged to his father. The model farm was a failure, but only because of the lack of full cooperation from Ottoman authorities. Davis never had enough hands to work the plantation, and observers noted that local hands brought on to work the plantation were lazy and shiftless, in stark contrast to the work ethic of the newly emancipated slaves. Macfarlane described the former slaves as "incomparably the best agricultural labourers we ever saw in Turkey." Davis wished to solicit still more free black laborers to come to Turkey to work the plantation, but the Pasha wanted him to bring over "Red Men" - American Indians - because they would "afford much amusement" to the Sultan. The situation is a fascinating interplay of racial assumptions on the part of Americans (white and black), Englishmen, and Turks that I won't concern myself with here.

While Macfarlane was staying with Davis and his family, the local Greek population celebrated Theophany. The whole plantation was aroused by the noise of the early morning procession. I found the scene of transplanted southerners, roused from sleep by this motley band to be amusing:

On Monday the 17th of January the Greeks celebrated their Epiphany. They began by times. At the second hour after midnight a fellow went through the streets of the village beating the rough pavement with a heavy club like a "Yangin var" man of Constantinople when a fire breaks out. About half an hour later some men at the Greek church beat with sticks and mallets upon the suspended iron plate which serves in lieu of the Turk prohibited bells. This monotonous clatter at a very few paces from our bedroom continued for some time. Next we heard a priest singing psalms through the nose in the street. Our sleep was pretty well murdered, but I did contrive to doze for two or three hours and can give no account of what passed in that interval. At sunrise we were started out of our beds by new and much louder noises. All the Greeks of the village formed into loose processional order were following their priests to the margin of the Sea of Marmora, which flowed close under one of the fronts of the Doctor's house [he refers to Davis' house]. The priests were psalmodizing most nasally; the people were talking and laughing as if they had some good joke in hand. There was no solemnity or seriousness but the very antithesis of solemnity. The priests appeared to be far gone in raki [raki - a local moonshine]: we were assured by a closer observer that one of them was very drunk. They occasionally stopped the psalmody to take their share in the merriment and laughter. These priests advanced to the end of a short rotten wooden jetty which projected into the Propontis. Some of the laymen got into a caique and pulled it a few yards ahead of the jetty; then a burly priest after saying a prayer and making some signs threw a crucifix into the sea and instantly three of the fellows who were in the boat plunged into the water head foremost after it. It must have been a chilling immersion for the morning was bitterly cold. Perhaps it was on this account that so few of the Greeks dived but the smallness of their number was noted by some as a proof of the decay of orthodox devotion at San Stefano. The man who succeeded in finding the cross and fishing it up from the bottom of the sea was hailed with many shouts.

Macfarlane, noting the "decay of orthodox devotion," asked a Greek man why this was so. He replied thusly in French: "C'es que nous lisons le grand Voltaire et tous les philosophes Francais." Loosely translated, because "we have been reading the great Voltaire and other French philosophers."