AN ENGLISHMAN IN THE EASTERN ORTHODOX

MELTING POT

My story begins and ends in Oxford. The Pan-Orthodox

English, Greek and Russian Church of the Annunciation
and the Holy Trinity, 1 Canterbury Rd, has been over the
past half-century a meeting place of East and West.

Leading churchmen have worshiped in this modest

North Oxford location. It is the local church of the
eminent theologian and writer, Metropolitan Kallistos of
Diokleia. Its distinguished visitors have been
Metropolitan Anthony of Surozh, to whose diocese it
once belonged; Pimen, Aleksy and Kirill, all future
patriarchs of Moscow, and the future Metropolitan of
Leningrad, Nikodim (Rotov), who advocated
rapprochement between Moscow and Rome. At one time
the former Athonite monk and theologian, Vasily
(Krivoshein), Archbishop of Brussels, served there, as
did the French theologian, Archimandrite Lev (Gillet).
Another monk of Mount Athos, Elder Sophrony
(Sakharov), the disciple of St Silouan the Athonite and

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founder of the Stavropeigic Monastery of St John the
Baptist in Tolleshunt Knights, Essex, also visited.

To the north of the church, on the Oxford ring road,

is the Wolvercote cemetery, where Tolkien is buried.
Here also lie most of the deceased 1 Canterbury Rd
Greek, Serbian and Russian parishioners; and just to the
northern side of them is an intriguing tombstone. Its
inscription reads: David Balfour 1903–1989 Monk
Diplomat Scholar and his wife Louise née von Zedlitz
1906–1994. Who was this Elizabethan man of many
parts, this monk whose wife survived him? Metropolitan
Kallistos, his DPhil supervisor, knew Balfour well and is
the source of the biography I am about to give.

David Balfour became a member of the Eastern

Orthodox Church by a circuitous route. He was baptized
an Anglican in 1903. Later in the same year, he and his
family became Roman Catholic. Having attended Roman
Catholic schools, he entered the novitiate in 1922 at the
French Benedictine Abbey in Farnborogh, Hampshire.

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There he met Dom Louis Gillet, the future
Archimandrite Lev.

Gillet inspired in Balfour an interest in the Christian

East. As a result, in 1925, Balfour left England for the
Benedictine priory of Amay-sur-Meuse in Belgium
where he felt better able to pursue his interest in Eastern
Orthodoxy. In 1926, he was sent to the German
University in Prague and then to Salzburg University to
study theology. In August 1927 he made his Solemn Life
Profession at Amay-sur-Meuse and was ordained
deacon. From 1928–1932 he taught at the Greek College
of St Athanasius in Rome. While at the College, he
studied at the Pontifical Oriental Institute, from which he
received his licentiate in 1931.

During his four-year stay in Rome, he became

interested in the Russian Orthodox Church and wrote
articles on it for the Amay periodical Irénikon. He made
lengthy and detailed contributions to the periodical’s
‘Chronicle of Russian Orthodoxy’, discussing with
sympathy and sensitivity the plight of the martyred

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church in the USSR. He also published the first ever
translations into English of essays by the Russian
philosopher Berdyayev.

In 1932, he travelled to Mount Athos to the Russian

Monastery of St Panteleimon. There his meeting with St
Silouan and his disciple, Monk Sophrony (Sakharov), so
profoundly affected Balfour that he abandoned
Catholicism, to which he ‘felt a strong aversion’,1 and
became Orthodox. In 1932, he was received into the
church in Paris by Metropolitan Elevfery, Exarch of the
Moscow Patriarchate in Western Europe. Balfour
decided to join the Moscow Patriarchate, rather than the
Russian Orthodox Church abroad. His old friend, Fr Lev
Gillet, had become a member of the latter, but St
Panteleimon Monastery had continued to be in contact
with the motherland and Balfour wanted to be part of a
church which preserved its links with Russia.

1
Kallistos, Metropolitan of Diokleia, ‘Obituary
of David Balfour’, Striving for Knowledge of
God: Correspondence with David Balfour
(Stavropegic Monastery of St John the
Baptist: Essex 2106), p. 13.

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 In 1932, Balfour was enrolled as a priest in the
Moscow Patriarchate parish of the Three Hierarchs
Church, rue Pétel, Paris. On 8 May next year, he was
tonsured to the small schema by Archbishop Veniamin
of Sebastopol with the name of Dimitry. In 1934,
Metropolitan Elevfery sent Fr Dimitry to London for six
months to liaise with a group of English Orthodox in the
hope of setting up a parish there. The venture failed from
lack of support and money, so he went back to rue Pétel.

In September 1935, Fr Dimitry returned to Mount

Athos, where he stayed for six months in a remote
Russian kellion (hermitage). The Greek authorities
forced him to leave the Holy Mountain: they were
becoming increasingly intolerant of visitors to the
Russian Athonite community and disapproved of one
who had been baptized and ordained in the Roman
Catholic Church. St Silouan told him to go back to Paris.
The young priest-monk, however, ignored his spiritual
mentor’s advice and spent 1936–41 in Athens.

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 While still under the jurisdiction of Metropolitan
Elevfery, who granted him yearly leave of absence, he
enrolled as a monk in Penteli Monastery outside Athens
and was made archimandrite by the head of the Church
of Greece, Archbishop Chrysostomos.2 The archbishop
appointed him as the pneumatikos (father-confessor and
spiritual counsellor) at Evangelismos Hospital, a royal
institution, thanks to which Fr Dimitry was in close
contact with the monarchy. He also took a degree in
theology at Athens university and was awarded him
arista (a first).

On 18 April 1941, on the eve of the German army’s

entrance into Athens, he left by ship for Egypt, having
received a ‘letter of canonical release’ from Archbishop
Chrysanthos, the successor of Chrysostomos. In Cairo,
as he wrote in his memoirs,

I had ceased to believe in the

exclusive claims of the Orthodox
Church and was disgusted with
the moral corruption of some
2
SRA XV, pp. 402, 409.

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 members of the unmarried
clergy.3

After five months in Cairo ‘doing nothing’, as he put

it, he shaved off his beard, took off his monastic habit
and broke from the Orthodox Church. In September that
year he entered the British intelligence service and was
soon promoted to the rank of major. In 1943, he was
seconded to the Foreign Service and joined the British
Embassy in Cairo to liaise with the Greek government in
exile. Next year, he was back in Athens, where he played
a key role as an interpreter and intermediary. All
communications between the British, and the Greek
regent and government were conducted through him. He
interpreted for Churchill, who was in Athens in
December 1944 and at the Varkiza Conference in
February 1945.

His time in Athens was blighted by the left-wing

Greek press, which pilloried him for having swapped the
black for the scarlet, and accused him of espionage. His
friends urged him to clear his name, but, to the
3
Kallistos, op. cit., pp. 17–18.

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embarrassment especially of the Greek church and
monarchy, he said nothing, deeming it unseemly for a
British intelligence officer to engage in a public dispute.
Many saw his silence as an admission of guilt.4

In 1948, Balfour married in a London registry office

a New Zealander, Louise (née von Zedlitz) Fitzherbert, 5
with whom he had a daughter, Charlotte, born in 1949.
From the end of the war until 1966 David Balfour
worked as a diplomat. He was Oriental Secretary in Tel
Aviv, then Consul-General in Smyrna (1951–5), Genoa
(1955–60) and Geneva (1960–3). He was awarded a
CBE in 1960. He retired from the FCO in 1968, after
eight years in Whitehall.

4
Wild rumours about him have persisted
about him. See the following URLs (the latter
in Greek):
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/soc.
culture.greek/gKaL0kdL9jY and
http://www.markoseugenikos.gr/index.php?
name=biography.of.david.balfour.
5
According to Metropolitan Kallistos, her
maiden name was just Fitzherbert: ibid., p.
20.

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 He continued working as a linguist, becoming Fellow
of the Institute of Linguists, in 1963, and Senior Tutor at
Wilton Park (Surrey) International Conference Centre.
From 1968–78 he worked as a conference interpreter.
His ability at languages was phenomenal. He had an
expert knowledge of Ecclesiastical Greek and Church
Slavonic. He spoke and wrote fluently French, Italian,
German, Modern Greek and Russian, and had a reading
knowledge of Spanish, Dutch, Hebrew, Turkish,
Romanian, Serbian and Bulgarian.6

In 1978, when he had reached the age of 75, he was

awarded his DPhil at Oxford. In the words of
Metropolitan Kallistos, his supervisor:

During the 1970s David resumed

the research on St Symeon of
Thessalonica that he had begun in
Greece forty years before. … [He
was] at least twice as old as any
of my other pupils… In an
enlarged form [his thesis] was
6
Ibid., p. 21.

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published in two volumes… It is
not often that a doctoral
dissertation sees the light of day
in the form of two large published
works, together amounting to
almost 600 pages… His work on
Symeon completed, David turned
to the publication of other
anecdota that he had unearthed in
the 1930s. His edition of St
Gregory the Sinaite’s unpublished
Discourse on the Transfiguration,
with an English translation and a
lengthy study (also in English) of
the author’s life and writings,
appeared as a series of articles in
the Athens periodical Theologia
during 1981–3… He also
contributed articles on Symeon of
Thessalonica and Gregory the
Sinaite to The Greek Orthodox
Theological Review and St

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 Vladimir’s Theological
Quarterly. The last project on
which he was engaged was a
critical edition of the unpublished
Second Century by St John of
Karpathos.7

In 1962, during his spell in Geneva, his life took a

final momentous turn. He woke his family in the middle
of the night and announced he was ‘once more a
believer’.8 As a result he sought out his old friend, the
disciple of St Silouan, Fr Sophrony, now abbot of the
Monastery of St John the Baptist. After hearing
Balfour’s lengthy confession and absolving him, Fr
Sophrony instructed him to go to Paris, as St Silouan had
done in 1935. This time Balfour obeyed.

There Metropolitan Nikolay of Korsun of the

Moscow Patriarchate readmitted him as a
communicating member of the church and allowed him

7
Ibid., pp. 22–4.
8
As reported in SRA XV, p. 405, he said to
them: ‘Ya vnov´veruyu.’

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to read and sing in services. Balfour was told, however,
that he could not be reinstated as a priest until either his
wife died before him or he found himself on his own
deathbed. Such, in brief, is his biography.

I have been fascinated by David Balfour because of

his achievements. As a linguist myself, I appreciate his
expertise, the level of which I could never hope to attain.
His written Russian is fluent, idiomatic and very
competent, yet he had no formal instruction in the
language, which he seems to have picked up through
conversing with its speakers and reading.9 More
impressive is his knowledge of Greek, one of the most
intricate and varied of the Indo-European languages.
There is an enormous difference between Byzantine and
Modern Demotic Greek, both of which he was a master.

Thanks to languages, he was accepted as one of their

own by Belgians, the French, Russians and Greeks. He
9
His parents had ‘large mining interests in
Russia’ (presumably before 1917), according
to Metropolitan Kallistos, op. cit., p. 10. As a
child, Balfour had been taken to Russia: SRA
VI, p. 275.

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also had considerable charm and could form lasting
friendships with people from widely differing social and
national circles. Like Patrick Leigh-Fermour, who
travelled throughout central and eastern Europe before
the Second World War, he found most doors open to
him.

His most remarkable social success was with the

Russians on Mount Athos and the Athenians. In the
1930s the Russian Athonite community was
beleaguered. From 1928, the Greek authorities had set
about enforcing a ban on Slav visitors from outside
Athos to the Russians there. The brotherhood of St
Panteleimon’s seemed thus condemned to die of old age:
pilgrims ceased to visit it, and no more novices or monks
could to join.

At the beginning of the 20th Century, however, St

Panteleimon Monastery was one of the largest and
wealthiest in the Orthodox world, with some two
thousand monks, and a thousand visitors and lay
workmen. The majority of monasteries on the Holy

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Mountain was Greek, and Greek Athonites had long
resented their Russian brothers, of whom they were
jealous and suspicious. After the liberation of Athos
from Turkish rule in 1912 by Greece and the Bolshevik
Revolution five years later, 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 for several months, at a time
when Slavs were banned and visitors from the west were
virtually unheard of, is extraordinary.

Balfour’s move to Athens in 1936 was no less

surprising. Not only did he ‘disobey’ St Silouan’s
instructions, but he went to live among the very people
who had forced him to leave Athos. Of course, the Greek
Athonites and authorities on the Holy Mountain were
very different from the people in Pendeli Monastery, and
those in the circles of Archbishop Chrysostomos and the
king. Nevertheless, nearly all Greeks had long mistrusted
and disliked their Orthodox rivals from the far north.
After a short while, Balfour had so much influence in

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Athens that he was again able to visit St Panteleimon’s
without hindrance.10

Something about Balfour captivated the monks of St

Panteleimon. One of the monastery’s senior fathers,
Elder Pinuphry, asked Fr Sophrony (Sakharov) about
him:

Fr Sophrony simply asked him to

pray, just as Balfour, as he was
leaving, had asked all the monks
to pray for him. Fr Pinuphry at
first said with some hopelessness,
‘Why should we be praying for
the Catholics? They are foreign to
us. But may God grant everyone
salvation.’ Nonetheless, he began
to pray, and after some days, on

10
The Russian chronicler of St Panteleimon
Monastery was so impressed by Blafour’s
ability to go everywhere without difficulty
that he writes: ‘By the beginning of 1939
[Balfour] had, without impediment, settled
[sic] in [the] monastery.’ SRA VI, p. 276.

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 meeting Fr Sophrony he said:
‘Balfour is an extraordinary man.
Imagine, at night during my Rule
of prayer I started praying for him
as you requested, and suddenly
the prayer became somehow
special, and seized my heart so
much that all these days, at home
and in church, I am praying only
for him.’11

Balfour was confident in his own ability to persuade

and influence people. While in Athens, he wrote to (the
future Archbishop) Vasily (Krivoshein), who was at the
time a monk at St Panteleimon’s with Fr Sophrony:

Please give my warm greetings to

Ioann Shakhovskoy. If he travels
through Athens, ask him to get in
touch with me. Should he need

11
Sister Magdalen, Foreword to Striving for
Knowledge of God: Correspondence with
David Balfour, p. 31.

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 help at the Ministry with his visa,
I’ll be glad to help. I’ve got pretty
strong connections here.12

The future archbishop kept up his friendship with

Balfour. The latter, already unfrocked and living in
Cairo, continued corresponding with Fr Vasili,
seemingly in the secure knowledge of the strength of
their friendship. In 1945, Balfour wrote in a far more
familiar and relaxed way, addressing the monk as ты
(tu), rather than Вы (vous); he signed his correspondence
‘Your brother in Christ David Balfour’, as opposed to
the ‘The sinful Priest-Monk Dimitry’.13

12
SRA XV, p. 400.
13
Ibid., pp. 410, 409. Note, however, that in
a letter to Balfour in 1945, Fr Sophrony
‘[continued] to address DB as a priest, and to
add the greeting “Christ is in our midst” …
He was not aware that DB had left the
priesthood and the monastic life.’ Striving for
Knowledge of God, fn. 270, p. 261. By this
time, Fr Sophrony was no longer in contact
with Fr Vasily, having moved away from St
Panteleimon’s and was living in a kellion
belonging to the Greek Athonite Monastery of
St Paul’s. In his letter to Fr Sophrony, dated

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 Assessing Balfour’s character, Metropolitan Kallistos
observes:

Always spiritually an explorer,

David was marked by a restless,
questing spirit, which made it
difficult to him ever to settle
down completely. A man of
brilliant intellect but also of
strong emotions, he could prove
impulsive and excitable. His
formidable energy, his frankness
and the candour of his criticisms,
made him seem at times
overbearing, and he did not
always appreciate the effect that
he had on others. But in reality he
was far less self-confident, far
more sensitive and humble, than
he appeared at first sight. The
many variations in his career led
others to suspect his sincerity, but
this was almost certainly unjust.14

21 July 1945, Balfour signs himself ‘Your

brother in Christ, whose name is David once
again, but for you, still Dimitr[y]’. Ibid., p.
361.
14
Kallistos, op. cit., pp. 9–10.

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 Metropolitan Kallistos movingly describes the death
of this restless genius:

During the last three years of his

life his health had begun to
deteriorate. In his illnesses he was
at times a far from easy patient,
but his wife looked after him with
devoted and unselfish care. He
died in his sleep at their home in
Kingsclere, outside Newbury.
During the final three weeks
much of his old restlessness
disappeared: he seemed happy
and at peace.15

15
Ibid., p. 24.

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