A higher calling
From the halls of Oxford to the slums of Nairobi: the unusual journey of a Cypriot priest
In January 1977, fresh out of Oxford with a theology PhD in hand, Limassol-born Andreas Tillyrides flew into Nairobi, Kenya. “I came here to stay three months,” he recounts, “and now it has been thirty years.”
Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus, who funded Tillyrides’ university education at Sorbonne and Oxford, had told him that he was being prepared to go to Nairobi.
“At the time my reaction was, ‘never’,” Tillyrides said. “After all my studies I wanted to be a professor. But he [Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus] told me to go to Nairobi and see. “I was sure I would not stay. But when I came here, I immediately made a decision the same day that I would die here.”
With the warming of relations between Cyprus and Kenya due to their mutual anti-colonial uprisings against the British, the Kenyan government had given Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus some land in Nairobi upon which to build a seminary. It was this seminary that Tillyrides would help to organise and open.
Tillyrides, who would later take on his sponsor’s name and in 2001 be elected Archbishop Makarios of Kenya, has never retracted his vow that he would live and die in Kenya; in fact, he has come extremely close to losing his life a number of times, whether from bouts of cerebral malaria or from violent attacks by robbers, one of which even left him unconscious. He considers it a miracle he is still alive.
The unrelenting work of the Kenya Archbishop as well as efforts from donor individuals and organisations (like the Cyprus-based Friends of Kenya and the Cyprus branch of Doctors of the World) have led to the construction on the seminary grounds of a clinic, an orphanage and a teacher’s college, among other things. He has also spearheaded the construction of hundreds of churches, clinics, children’s homes, food centres and schools throughout Kenya.
He has doggedly pursued his twin-pronged mission to spread Orthodoxy and to improve living conditions for the destitute but it has not been without a price. The Archbishop, who has never taken malaria pills or received inoculations, has come down with cerebral malaria numerous times, with one episode even leaving him in a coma for several days.
“I remember waking up in the morning feeling like someone was choking me,” Archbishop Makarios said. “I thought that was the end of me. They later told me that my fever and convulsions were so extreme that two men were sitting on me to hold me down.”
The Archbishop spends most of his time in the most impoverished and consequently dangerous parts of the country and has been attacked four times. The first robbery was in 1985, when three men on the street assaulted him from behind, choking him, and putting a knife to him.
The largest attack took place on seminary grounds. Twenty armed robbers surrounded the main seminary building while he was in his bedroom. They first choked him to the point where he lost his voice and then clubbed him over the head with a steel rod until he fell unconscious. They then ransacked what they could.
Just last year, three armed men in a car pulled up beside his car and threw the Archbishop out of the passenger’s door onto the asphalt. The impact broke his arm.
“Unfortunately they took my encolpia (medallion depicting Mary and Christ),” he said. “They see it shining and they think it is gold.”
But despite these life-threatening health episodes and physical assaults from which most people would have fled to safer conditions, Archbishop Makarios has stayed on, continuing to build more churches, schools and clinics in mosquito-infested jungles and dangerous slums.
It is no small thing for a Cypriot – and a Sorbonne and Oxford-educated Cypriot at that – who speaks Greek, English, French, Russian and Italian, as well as numerous African languages and dialects, to relocate and dedicate himself to one of the poorest communities of sub-Saharan Africa. One cannot help but sense in the Archbishop something of an apostle who has renounced a life of comfort and privilege in favour of an unshakeable higher calling.
But the Archbishop is not one to make himself into a martyr. In fact, he insists he is most happy where he is. “It is not easy for somebody to stay in a place where he is not happy. If you are not happy somewhere, don’t stay. Because you’ll make yourself suffer, and then you’ll make others suffer. Do the work only if you are happy and if it fulfills your life.”
He does concede, however, that there are countless difficulties and challenges in Kenya, which requires one to be “very strong, both spiritually and psychologically… to find a way to endure and to sustain yourself.” The essential thing, he notes, is to never resign or submit to the difficulties.
“My motto all these years was to never give up. Even if you’re dying, never give up. As for how much we endure, it’s up to God. When you put it in your head that you don’t get tired or hungry, then you manage. If you say one day ‘I’m tired, I’m exhausted, I cannot do this, I cannot do that,’ it will not assist your work. And we’re here to love and to work, not to relax. Work is life.”
His schedule certainly involves ceaseless work. The Archbishop is on the road on an almost daily basis. He travels to some of the remotest regions of Kenya – some of which require armed escorts as the roads are frequented by roving bandits – to check up on churches, schools, clinics, orphanages and so on. In wealthier countries, intercity drives can be relaxing, but in Kenya an average such drive consists of five or six hours of swerving and slamming over pothole-ridden roads.
Despite the innumerable churches constructed under his guidance and the thousands of Kenyans who have joined the Orthodox Church, Archbishop Makarios insists that proselytising does not take place.
“We don’t go out knocking on doors to bring people in. We merely say come and see. If they like what we are doing, then they will join us. We are not forcing anybody.”
Naturally, all missionary work inevitably carries with it an unsavoury load of historical baggage. In numerous novels the renowned Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe has described with unsentimental but scorching starkness the destructive effect of Christian missionaries upon tribal culture, while the Western practice of “Christianising the savages” through invasion and bloodshed will not soon be forgotten by those being Christianised (to take one example, President McKinley justified the bloody 1899 US invasion of the Philippines by explaining that the Filipinos were “unfit for government… and there was nothing left… to do but to take them all and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilise and Christianise them”).
Of course, none of the sword-wielding Crusaders, the rifle-toting converters or the hooded dungeon-thugs of the Inquisition belonged to the Orthodox tradition, but one might still reasonably imagine that the Orthodox Church, with its unshakeable adherence to ancient Byzantine customs, would oppose the ‘polluting’ of its ceremonies by foreign rituals and practices.
But in Kenya, at least, that does not seem to be the case. “Actually we as a church are the ones who are keeping and encouraging the culture of the people,” Archbishop Makarios said, pointing out that even within Orthodoxy, millennia old practices from the pre-Christian era are still maintained.
Archbishop Makarios of Kenya also chants in the tribal dialects as well as Greek, and he oversees the translation of the texts of the Orthodox services from Greek into the local dialect. “For some of these tribes, this is the first time that written texts are circulating in their languages.”
He also insists that every tribe – there are 42 i
n Kenya – demonstrate its traditional dances and songs. At every church consecration and liturgy, African dancing, singing and drumming takes place alongside the Orthodox rituals.
Cynics might argue that incorporating tribal dialects and dances is merely a shrewd tactic to draw more Africans into the Orthodox Church. While there is no question of the effectiveness of including local traditions from a recruiting point of view, such an argument is hard-pressed to account for the fact that the 62-year-old Archbishop actually joins in on the dances with the congregation, something that more rigid-minded clergymen would consider blasphemy.
Archbishop Makarios recognises that many in the Orthodox world might find it “unthinkable” for a bishop to take part in dances, but that does not dissuade him from participating. “It does no harm to anybody.”
It is precisely his unconventionality that lends the Archbishop an aura of intrigue. Whereas other Archbishops might have sequestered themselves in their gilded quarters, Archbishop Makarios is constantly traveling into slums and jungle communities, mingling with the people from his parishes.
But unusual as his bishopric life may be (he is also an avid classical pianist and the author of numerous books and articles), his sermons and teachings are very traditional in their Christian message. During a funeral for the wife of a chaplain in the jungle village of Kabewa outside Lake Victoria, he preached on a grassy slope for twenty minutes before a thousand or so neighboring villagers on love for one another and resurrection, a topic he claims he speaks of from personal experience after having “died and was resurrected” during his most extreme bout of cerebral malaria.
“God created us, not to suffer, not to fear but to carry forever the hope of the resurrection in our lives,” he said to the seated throng. “Remember that there is no death, there is only the life to come. If we have the conviction that we are not dying, that we are always alive, we will learn the real meaning of our lives…
“Love one another. Respect one another. Acknowledge one another. If you do so, you do the same for Jesus Christ. As I said before, each and every one of us is the image of God. So why would I want to oppose you? Why would I want to kill you?”
The Archbishop reiterated these sentiments (minus the talk of the resurrection) during a dinner with a group of Americans who had come to build a church in the remote arid northern region of Lake Turkana.
“By being together and loving one another we are actually becoming closer to God. Each and every person is God Himself. And by loving that person we come closer to God. This is the secret, actually. We should always remember this. And [it] has given us a lot of encouragement, a lot of hope and a lot of joy. And then we are able to do our work. It doesn’t matter where [others] come from, what nationality, what languages they speak, what cultures they belong to, they are all a creation of God.”
It is no secret, even among some Orthodox Christians, that such words emanating from high ecclesiastical figures often amount to nothing more than platitudes and empty rhetoric, especially considering last year’s unbrotherly squabbling before and during the archbishopric elections between the Kykkos bishop and the then-Paphos bishop (now the Archbishop of Cyprus).
But after spending some time with Archbishop Makarios and following him on his grueling rounds of some of the most poverty-stricken communities in Kenya, one is left with the impression that he not only believes these words but has also dedicated his life to them.
His Nairobi seminary students certainly feel that way. “He [Archbishop Makarios] cares about all Kenyans, whether they are Orthodox or not,” said one seminary student of Archbishop Makarios. “Not all of them do.”
This is not all that surprising considering it was the plight of the Kenyans on the street that first motivated the Archbishop to remain in Nairobi.
“When I first came to Kenya, I was thinking I was going to be a professor teaching in an Oxford auditorium. But when I woke up in the morning here, as soon as I stepped out and saw the people, I posed the following question to myself: ‘Okay, maybe you will be a great famous professor, and all these people will write about and speak of you, but you will not offer anything to these people. Won’t you feel remorse?’
“These people had so many needs. If I became a professor at a university it would have been out of egoism. So I made my decision. Everyone was saying, ‘Are you crazy? Have you gone mad?’ But I never regretted it.”
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