Did you know that during the pre-revolutionary times, there was an unprecedented ideological conflict between Enlightenment thinkers and Christian scholars in the Greek region regarding the correctness of the Heliocentric System? These disputes even include the possibilities of extraterrestrial life in our cosmic neighborhood. What are the arguments from both sides? How do the conservative ecclesiastical circles of the time react to the introduction of the Natural Sciences in the new school curricula? For what reasons, during the Revolution, does the patriarchate impose an Orthodox Holy Examination in Constantinople? And how does the relationship between the Church of Greece and the science of Astronomy evolve, up to the year of the lunar eclipse?

Journalist Minas Papageorgiou sheds light on a seemingly paradoxical but extremely fascinating story from the turbulent years of the Greek Enlightenment. A story that demonstrates how the preparation for the great Uprising reflects, beyond what we already know, a desperate cry from Greek intellectuals for more Education, free from restrictions, dogmas, and censorship. In this ideological confrontation, the enemy is not only the Ottomans...

Minas Papageorgiou's book is particularly timely and enlightening, vividly capturing the prevailing views in the Greek intellectual sphere of the 18th and 19th centuries, on a little-known ideological conflict between Enlightenment thinkers and the Clergy.

Dionysis Simopoulos,
Honorary Director of the Eugenides Planetarium