Remember the Greek guy who mocked a Greek Orthodox monk by pretending to call him a pasta dish? And was charged with blasphemy? Well he’s been convicted of that stupid non-crime, and sentenced to ten months in prison.
A man who created a Facebook page poking fun at a revered Greek Orthodox monk has been sentenced to 10 months in prison in Greece after being found guilty of blasphemy.
Thousands of Greeks took to social networking sites to protest against the arrest in 2012 of Filippos Loizos, 28, who used a play on words to portray Father Paisios as a traditional pasta-based dish.
“He was merely satirising in a country that gave birth to satire,” his lawyer, Yorgos Kleftodimos, said on Friday.
Aristophanes ring a bell? Loukian of Samosata? (Ok he was Assyrian but he wrote in Greek, and that amounts to being Greek.)
The charges against him, of insulting religion and malicious blasphemy, were filed after Christos Pappas, a politician from the far-right Golden Dawn party, brought the issue before parliament. Pappas is currently detained pending trial on charges of belonging to a criminal group, as part of a government crackdown on Golden Dawn.
I wish Euripides were around right now.