Did you hear the one about the Greek monk who was really a British spy? Thread. 👇
In the Oxford cemetery where Tolkien is buried stands the grave of David Balfour. Born into a wealthy British family in 1903, Balfour studied at the universities of Prague, Salzburg, Rome, & later Athens. He was a true polyglot, speaking🏴🇬🇷🇫🇷🇩🇪🇮🇹🇵🇱🇷🇺 fluently & even a little🇹🇷 
Raised Catholic, he became fascinated with the Orthodox Church & traveled to the Russian monastery of St. Panteleimon on Mt. Athos in 1932. There his meeting with St Silouan & his disciple, Monk Sophrony so profoundly affected Balfour he abandoned Catholicism & became Orthodox.
After the Bolshevik Revolution, when most ties with the motherland were brutally severed, St Panteleimon’s was cut off from the outside world. That an Englishman had access to the monastery at a time when Slavs were banned & western visitors virtually unheard of, is extraordinary
In 1932, Balfour was received into the church in Paris by Metropolitan Elevfery, Exarch of the Moscow Patriarchate in Western Europe. The next year he was tonsured to the small schema by Archbishop Veniamin of Sevastopol, with the name of Dimitry.
In 1935, Fr Dimitry returned to a remote Russian hermitage on Mt Athos but was forced to leave the Holy Mountain by Greek authorities, perhaps suspicious of a Russian Athonite who had been ordained a Roman Catholic. Told to go back to Paris, Balfour instead headed to Athens.
Dimitry quickly became popular with the wealthy in Athens. His tatty robes & sweet voice, calm demeanor & eccentric forked beard made him the most famous priest in Athens. Something about Balfour had captivated the monks of St Panteleimon & it worked on Athenian elites too.
Often invited to high-society gatherings, he became confessor to many prominent Athenians & was a regular in the homes of Greek generals & politicians. He performed ecclesiastical duties for Greece’s royals & his access to the palace undoubtedly made him privy to valuable intel.
Then on 18 April 1941, on the eve of the German army’s entrance into Athens, parishioners saw Fr. Dimitry leaving his church with hair cut short, clean-shaven, wearing khaki shorts & army boots. Along with British embassy staff he left without a word by ship for Egypt.
Balfour claimed in his memoirs that only now did he join British Intelligence, after a crisis of faith. Whatever the truth, he held the rank of major in British Intelligence service within months of reaching Cairo, where King George & some Greek army units had fled to.
3+ years later, after Greece’s liberation, Balfour returned to Athens as Britain's top diplomat & communications between British, and Greek governments were conducted through him. He interpreted for Churchill, who was in Athens in 1944 & at the Varkiza Conference in 1945.
His old parishioners who saw the person they knew as Fr Dimitry return as a British official were understandably angry at him, no doubt feeling a deep betrayal. The left-wing Greek press pilloried him for having swapped the black for the scarlet & accused him of espionage.
Friends urged him to clear his name, but he deemed it unseemly for a British Intelligence officer to engage in a public dispute. Many saw his silence as an admission of guilt. He was accused of being the hand behind much of the early violence of the civil war.
Balfour's experience of the plight of the Russian church under communism might well have fueled a deep conviction that Greece must not become communist at any cost, if only to preserve the Orthodox faith. Bolsheviks taking Mt. Athos was unconscionable.
David Balfour left Greece in 1947 but remained a British diplomat until 1966. In 1978, aged 75, he resumed the research on St Symeon of Thessalonica that he had begun in Greece forty years before and was awarded his DPhil at Oxford University.
Balfour's ability at languages was phenomenal (especially for a Brit). He had an expert knowledge of Byz Greek & Church Slavonic, spoke & wrote fluently French, Italian, German, modern Greek & Russian & had passable Spanish, Dutch, Hebrew, Turkish, Romanian, Serbian & Bulgarian.
In 1962, Balfour woke in the night & announced he was once more a believer. He was readmitted to the orthodox church but could not be reinstated as a priest until either his wife died or he found himself on his own deathbed. He died in 1989, 5 years before his wife Louise.
For more information, see Nicholas Fennell's "An Englishman In The Eastern Orthodox Melting Pot" & Archmandrite Sphrony's "Striving for knowledge of God: Correspondence with David Balfour"
