Alikakos said he welcomed the attention the trial brought to his investigation. “The plaintiffs have tried to hide the truth. I feel great joy and satisfaction that their video testimonies were heard in court today, where they confess that the Holy Fire lights up naturally,” Alikakos told the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network.
Though the matter ended in an acquittal, its longevity speaks to the powerful position the Orthodox church still holds in Greece, whose constitution deems it the “prevailing religion” of the modern Greek state.
In recent years, Greek secularists have fought to decouple the church from Greece’s public education system, and this year in February, the church lobbied intensively against the Greek government in an attempt to block it from legalizing gay marriage.
“Essentially, today Greek secular justice decides whether it will sever the ties of our country with the Middle Ages or whether it will continue to blindly face eternally uncontrolled and unscrupulous monstrous fraudsters, as long as the latter wear a ‘rassa,’” said Petros Tatsopoulos, a Greek journalist and former parliamentarian, using the Greek word for cassock.
This article originally appeared here.