Date Published:

Abstract:

This article focuses on the case of Andreas Laskaratos (1811–1901), a famous satirical poet from the Ionian island of Cephalonia (Kefallinia) and a representative of the Heptanese School of Literature. Laskaratos was excommunicated from the Orthodox Church of Greece because of his criticism of the religious establishment. Apart from his other writings, a great number of his satirical poems present trenchant criticism of the Orthodox Church and its impact on people’s lives. Laskaratos was critical of superstition in the church and accused the clergy of taking advantage of its social status and people’s naivety. His vitriolic critique focused on the supposedly miraculous icons, religious rituals, symbols, and relics. This article demonstrates how Laskaratos’s satirical poetry expresses secularist ideas that probably could not be articulated otherwise within the context of the strict social control exercised by the Orthodox Church. Viewing satirical poetry as constructive social criticism, the main argument is that Laskaratos’s poetry builds on Enlightenment ideas and that he can be situated among the pioneer secularist freethinkers within the Greek Orthodox context.

October 2024: Alexandros Sakellariou holds a PhD from Panteion University in the field of Sociology of Religion. Currently, he is a Senior Researcher at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Department of Sociology. He has extensive experience working since 2011 as a researcher in European and national research projects and he has taught at the Hellenic Open University a class on Contemporary Sociological Approaches in European Societies (2016-2024). His main research interests include sociology of religion and non-religion, sociology of youth, political sociology, historical sociology, radicalisation, qualitative research methods, history and memory. He has over 70 publications in national and international journals, edited volumes, encyclopedias, and conference proceedings. He has published two books, Religion and Pandemic in Greek Society: Power Relations, Religious Populism and the Pending Secularisation (2020, in Greek) and Atheism in Greek Society: From Orthodox Religious Memory to the Atheist Religious Consciousness (2022, in Greek).