The Metropolitan Throne of Athens is the highest and most exalted position that a mortal Greek could approach, and it is, in fact, the next to the King's Throne, most influential occupation, and more powerful, even than the Royal Throne, because, the Metropolite of Athens is the spiritual leader of all Greeks.
There was plenty of rejoicing in the Queen's camarilla, at the installation of Procopios (that was the name of the monk) as the Metropolite of Athens, and every effort, Queen Olga leading the fight, had gone forth to assure a complete victory for the Russian bureaucracy, over the few remaining unspoiled patriotic Greeks.
All the characteristics of a civil war were enacted in the streets of Athens when Queen Olga attempted to enforce upon the Greek people a new inferior language in their Bibles, and in their holy mass--a language, which the Greek people considered as a means to confound their historical and religious customs and habits and subdue them into a Russian spiritual dependency. Against the attempt there was the very best element of the Greek scholars. Adamantios Korais fought the fight, 100 years before this attempt was made, and he distinctly and clearly made it understood that the Attic Greek language has been, it is and must be the safeguard of all that is beautiful in the Greek history.
Faithful to their traditions the Greeks of the present generation fought and won a triumphant victory. The innocent blood of the people that was slain on the streets of Athens by orders from the Royal Palace, have wrote with indelible letters, the anathema, which, frenzied mothers in the sight of their assassinated sons, and overwhelmed in grief, cried against Queen Olga, and her crown all but torn to pieces by the wronged multitudes.
Within 24 hours from that terrible bloody day, that will remain an indelible stigma in the history of Queen Olga's life, the most exalted Metropolite Procopios was a fallen ragmuffin and the most hated person in all Greece. And when every one of his colleagues deserted him and the King and Queen shut their door in his face, leaving him a pitiful victim of the political plots to save the royal skin, and while there was no visible friend to give him a helping hand when fallen from the Metropolitan Throne, and while this monk-metropolite Procopios, in all his glorious days had been a profound enemy against every honest effort, especially against young priests who refused to serve his unlawful appetites, and my own experience with this monk-metropolite Procopios is not of the kind to be printed, yet, it was I who put my own life in a probable danger to save him from the mob, that was ready to attack him, and probably kill him, the day after I made his escape possible into the Saint Mary's Monastery, Salamis, where at the time I was Archimandrites.