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Financial Times quotes Takis Michas, social affairs specialist at the Athens daily Eleftherotypia, as saying: "Greece is an inward-looking society. Orthodox values reinforce that mentality. Orthodoxy sees the West as a threat, a place where conspiracies are hatched against it," a mind frame of both Greeks and Serbs, which draws its source from the ancient split between western and eastern Christendom.
Whereas British historian Norman Davies writes in his book "Europe A History": "From the time of the Crusades, the Orthodox looked on the west as the source of subjugation worse than the infidel." This mindset is made manifest in the United States, too. According to recent news reports, Archbishop Spyridon, the head of the Greek Orthodox Church in the United States, who has spent most of his life in Europe, has been accused of trying to keep the church inaccessible to members who feel more American than Greek. Spyridon, who is the first American-born leader of the Greek Orthodox church in this country, says he works to protect the church's Byzantine traditions, proving to be one of those Greeks who are still living in the Byzantine empire. As Jeane Carthner of the newspaper Liberacion points out: "A few years ago, the Greeks were enemies of the Albanians, Macedonians and Bulgarians. They are constant enemies of the Turks, while now they have become enemies of the Americans, the British, the French, the Germans and the rest of the world." "The West is full of enemies," the president of Greece, Costis Stephanopolous, has been quoted as saying. Scholars consider such statements "a reminder of emotions that are deeply felt in the eastern Balkans. The common link is the Orthodox religious tradition. It is a tie that cements the alliance with Serbia."
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