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Recognition, and the Nationalists at the Edge

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Recognition, and the Nationalists at the Edge

Two things happened to the Greek revival in its first thirty years. It won legal standing, and it acquired an unwanted constituency.

Recognition came slowly and against opposition from the Church of Greece, which is not a disestablished body and whose objection carried weight. An Athens court granted recognition to organised worship of the Greek gods in 2006, and Ellinais held a rite at the Temple of Olympian Zeus in January 2007, the first there in some sixteen centuries. In 2017 the state accorded the Hellenic Ethnic Religion the status of a known religion, which allows a house of worship to be opened and permits clergy to conduct legally recognised marriages.

The other development is less comfortable. A revived ethnic religion in a country with an active nationalist right is an obvious target for appropriation, and the ancient gods have been used as emblems by people whose interest in libation and hymn is nil. The organised revival has generally resisted this, and its principal bodies present the religion as a matter of practice and belief open to anyone rather than as a possession of Greek descent.

It should be said plainly that there is no single documented repudiation in Hellenism equivalent to Declaration 127 in Heathenry, and this entry does not claim one. The dispute in Greek reconstructionism is real, ongoing, and conducted more in the internal politics of small organisations than in public statements a reader can be pointed to.

Adherent numbers are unreliable. YSEE has spoken of a few thousand practitioners in Greece with a much wider circle of sympathisers. That figure is the organisation's own, there is no independent count, and the Greek census does not ask.
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