Katerina Anagnostaki (University of )

Crafting the Cretan State: The Place of Religion

This paper focuses on the political views on religion in Crete at the time of the establishment of the Cretan State (1899). The Cretan Constitution of 1899 made no reference to any official or dominant state religion. What’s more, it affirmed that Cretans of any religion were equal before the Law. Just some years later though, in the second Constitution of 1907, one crucial paragraph was added designating Orthodox Christianity as the dominant religion in Crete. The paper aims at understanding the reason why, within just a few years, this paragraph was added; why it was now considered a meaningful addition to the new Constitution; what had changed. The paper argues that there were no fundamental changes regarding notions of religion between the years 1899 and 1907. Those political forces promoting the dominance of Orthodox Christianity were present from the very beginning of the State, and were strongly represented in the State’s institutions. Focusing on the views on religion that the members of the Cretan State Constituent Assembly expressed while drafting the first Constitution in 1899, the paper highlights the importance that religious identity acquired in Autonomous Crete. In doing so it enriches our understanding of what it meant not to be an Orthodox Christian in the Cretan State as well as of how the idea of religious minority was constructed in the aftermath of the Empire.

Katerina Anagnostaki is a PhD Candidate in at the Department of History- of the University of Crete. She has a bachelor degree in History from the and a master degree in Contemporary Greek and European History from the University of Crete. Her dissertation focuses on the presence of a rather forgotten and understudied minority of Crete, the Cretan Jews. It wishes to unearth the circumstances under which this religious group was formed and structured in Hania: the community’s social, cultural and economic profile; the kind of relations the Jews maintained with the state institutions; the dynamics within the Jewish community; their relations with other religious groups; the content of Jewishness in this concrete place and time.