The Patriarch Sylvester, who shepherded the Patriarchate of Antioch in the decades following the schism of 1724, is a complex and often-misunderstood figure who was nevertheless pivotal in ensuring the Orthodox Church’s survival during a turbulent period of its history. A recently-published book, Sylvester of Antioch: Life and Achievements of an 18th Century Christian Orthodox Patriarch by the Romanian historian Mihai Țipău, available to download for free in open-access here, now gives us a richly-detailed account of Sylvester and his world.
Țipău begins the book by putting to rest a persistent myth about Sylvester that continues to be repeated in both polemical and scholarly literature: that he was an outsider imposed upon the Patriarchate of Antioch by the Holy Synod of Constantinople because of his Greek ethnicity. In fact, Sylvester was a blood relative of his predecessor, Athanasius III Dabbās, natively bilingual in Greek and Arabic and, though he was formally elected and consecrated patriarch in Constantinople, this entailed significant input from Antioch.
When discussing Sylvester’s ethnic and family origins, Țipău judiciously presents the available evidence. There is no doubt that the patriarch was born on Cyprus and there is evidence suggesting that he may have been from the area of Lemessos. It is notable, however, that in a letter to the metropolitan of that city, Sylvester mentions his “brother according to the flesh Sulaiman,” where the Greek orthography (Σολοημάνην) makes it clear that he used the Arabic form of his name. In other documents, Sylvester refers to his parents in Arabic as Jirjī (جرجي ) and Fotīn (فتين), while he uses the typical Greek forms Γεώργιος and Φωτεινή when referring to them in Greek. Țipău is right to quickly dismiss the earliest published description of Sylvester’s family origins, relating that he was of an Orthodox Cypriot father and Maronite mother, on the grounds that the source, Michel Le Quien’s Oriens Christianus, published in 1740, was evidently biased and ill-informed. He does, however, give credence to the testimony of the French ambassador in Constantinople, Jean-Baptiste Picon, who met with Sylvester in 1725 and referred to him in a letter shortly thereafter as Athanasius Dabbās’ nephew. This is also supported by other contemporaries who state that the two men were relatives without specifying the degree of kinship. The few secondary sources that make note of this assume that it means that he was the son of Athanasius’ sister, but Țipău points out that there is no particular reason that he could not have been the son of his brother, and indeed, Sylvester’s use of the form “Jirjī” for his father’s name in Arabic (where he could have just as easily used the more Greek form “Jawārjiyūs”) suggests that this may indeed be the case. Further evidence for Sylvester’s family ties to the Patriarchate of Antioch can be found in a letter by the scholar and polemicist Elias Fakhr to his nephew (and Sylvester’s secretary) Mūsā al-Ṭrābulsī, where he mentions in passing that Mūsā is the patriarch’s kinsman.
Țipău is nevertheless careful not to apply an ethnic label to Sylvester, who seems never to have described himself in such terms, even if he did characterize others as “Greek” or “Arab” and frequently referred to Syria as “Arabia.” Instead, Țipău highlights the evident high quality of the patriarch’s Greek education, the fact that he used both Greek and Arabic in his correspondence and liturgical celebrations, and his extensive printing activity exclusively in Arabic. The overall image that emerges is that of a bilingual patriarch who saw himself as simply an Orthodox Christian, who was closely connected to the Greek-speaking world while committed to ministering to his Arabic-speaking flock in Arabic.
For the circumstances of Sylvester’s election, Țipău makes much use of an important source which, while already published in 1906, has flabbergastingly almost entirely escaped scholarly attention.[1] In his collection of documents issued by the Patriarchate of Constantinople, Kallinikos Delikanes includes a decision by the Holy Synod of Constantinople under Patriarch Jeremias III to elect the metropolitan of Drama, Joachim, as patriarch of Antioch in 1724, in reaction to the move by the people of Damascus (without the participation of a bishop) to elect the Catholic Seraphim Ṭānās to the see. According to this document, when the Sublime Porte learned that a Catholic had been elected, the grand vizier issued in writing a “formidable, powerful and obligatory commandment” for the synod to elect a Phanariot of unquestionable Orthodoxy, categorically forbidding them from electing anyone from the Patriarchate of Antioch. It is, as Țipău notes, entirely possible that the Holy Synod of Constantinople solicited such a command from the Porte to legitimize what they already intended to do, but in the event, it would not come to pass. Instead, it seems that the desires of the Antiochians prevailed, and Sylvester, who had served as protosyngellos in Aleppo and had been designated successor by Athanasius Dabbās, was formally elected and consecrated in Constantinople. In fact, in an unpublished letter from Dabbās’ former secretary (and later, an ardent Catholic polemicist) Niʿma ibn al-Khūrī Tūmā to Sylvester, the secretary is quick to remind him that it was he who composed the letter from Aleppo (where the Holy Synod was in session) recalling him from Mount Athos to Syria to become patriarch. Thus, the whole affair of Sylvester’s election turns out not to be a story of Constantinople imposing its will upon Antioch, but rather of it adapting its plans to accommodate local Syrian demands.
Sylvester’s many subsequent travels and travails as he sought to defend Orthodoxy in Antioch are too complex to summarize here, but Țipău does an incredible job of collecting and piecing together a vast array of literary sources—many unpublished and previously unknown to scholarship—as well as an array of physical artifacts connected to the patriarch. His account of Sylvester’s network of contacts, not only among his flock, but from throughout the Ottoman world—Wallachian princes, Greek prelates, Latin missionaries, French and British merchants and diplomats, among many others—provides a panoply of the social world of 18th Ottoman Christian clerical elites. As expected for a volume in the book series produced by the ERC-funded TypArabic project, Țipău meticulously reviews the results of Sylvester’s Arabic-language printing activity in Moldavia, Wallachia, and Beirut and, perhaps an even more remarkable achievement, catalogues all icons known to have been painted by the patriarch, several of which are reproduced in color. The result is a uniquely rich contribution to the history of the Patriarchate of Antioch that will not soon be surpassed.
[1] This is apparently due to a printing error (corrected in the errata!) that misstates its year of issue as 1734. To my knowledge, the only secondary source that makes use of it—without citation—is Dom C.L. Spiessens, o.s.b., “Les patriarches d’Antioche et leur succession apostolique,” Orient Syrien 7.4 (1962), 389-345, available in English translation here.