Media reports suggest Bishop Athanassios has brought out ‘campaigning sisters’
IN WHAT appears to be the latest round of mudslinging in the archbishopric elections saga, accusations have surfaced that a team of 30 nuns have come from Greece to help garner clerical support for Limassol bishop Athanassios. A Limassol Bishopric spokesman has described the allegations as “fantasies”.
A front-page article yesterday in Communist mouthpiece Haravgi, alleged that 30 nuns came “in a hurry on a midnight flight to begin the pre-elections campaign in support of Athanassios”.
The communist party has lent its support to Nikiforos of Kykkos so the latest supposed expos? of electoral connivances among the support group of the Limassol Bishop, who narrowly beat out Nikiforos in the popular vote, comes as no surprise.
The daily offers as evidence the claim that several of the nuns are staying at homes of supporters of Bishop Athanassios.
The Kykkos Bishopric has also taken up the issue, referring the matter to the Acting Synod head Paphos bishop Chrysostomos.
Nikiforos’ chief campaign staffer, Archimandrite Isaias Kykkotis, told state radio that he had conveyed to the locum tenens yesterday morning some “information” alleging electoral shenanigans surrounding the arrival of “certain groups of nuns”, although he refused to detail the information or speculate on its truth.
“I don’t want to comment on the contents of the information because it would cast a shadow on people,” Kykkotis said. “We want harmony in the church and it doesn’t serve anyone to analyse any information that we have. Let the locum tenens judge.”
While Kykkotis said it was “risky” to conclude whether or not the nuns came to influence the elections, he then said that it was suspicious that a large numbers of nuns “from specific areas of Greece around Mt. Athos” arrived in Cyprus during the this critical electoral period.
“Maybe the fact that they came at midnight and so on would instil in us some suspicions if indeed it’s true what the papers wrote,” Kykkotis said.
“We’ll have to see how they behave when they come to Cyprus. It may have been a programmed pilgrimage. It is true that the time and the way they came is a bit suspicious, but other than that it would be risky to make any accusations.”
Spokesman for bishop Athanassios, Paraskevas Agathonas said that there was nothing unusual about nuns coming from Greece to Cyprus on pilgrimage at this time of the year.
“Who knows what else they’ll say tomorrow,” Agathonas said. “It wouldn’t be surprising if they write about monks coming [in support of Athanassios] to influence the male monasteries.”
Although the press has picked up on the Haravgi allegation, it is unlikely it will be given much credence without solid evidence considering that the daily’s endorsement of Nikiforos is public knowledge.
On the day after the election, Haravgi came out with the headline “Precedence to Kykkos”, claiming that the Kykkos Bishop had the advantage in votes up through the late hours of election night and suggesting that he would by the end of the process assemble the majority of the general electoral representatives.
But the paper’s projection seemed to many to have been based more on wishful thinking than reality when the poll results found that Limassol’s Athanassios secured the most special representatives, winning 641 of the 1400 representatives compared to Nikiforos’ 615.
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