2017 Greek Legal Recognition of Hellenismos

Greek law distinguishes between a religion and a licensed place of worship, and the 2017 decision concerns both. The General Secretariat of Religion, part of the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs, granted a licence for an official place of worship in Athens to the modern worshippers of the Greek gods, and the grant carried with it the recognition of the movement as a known religion under the constitutional and statutory framework governing non Orthodox communities. That is a specific administrative outcome and it is worth stating precisely, because the event has been reported in wider terms than the documents support. It does not make Hellenismos a legally established religion, it does not confer the position the Orthodox Church of Greece holds, and it does not by itself resolve questions about marriage, burial, taxation or the status of practitioners' associations.

What it does establish is standing: a religious community that had been refused recognition at first instance and on appeal in earlier proceedings obtained a licensed place of worship and official acknowledgement of its existence, which is the threshold requirement for most other legal claims a religious body can make in Greece.

The 2017 licence followed roughly two decades of applications, refusals and appeals pursued chiefly by the Supreme Council of the Ethnikoi Hellenes, which had been formed in the late 1990s to represent practitioners and to press the legal case. Earlier attempts to register the association and to secure recognition were rejected at first instance and on appeal, and the organisation's own published account of the sequence is the fullest available narrative of it. The atlas cites that account as the community's own record and marks it as such, since a body reporting on the litigation it conducted is an interested witness even when it is the best informed one. Several things remain unsettled and the community says so.

Questions about the legal effect of rites performed by its clergy, about access to archaeological sites for worship, and about the treatment of the movement in Greek public life have continued to be raised. The atlas records the 2017 decision as the first clear legal standing for organised worship of the Greek gods in Greece since the suppression of the ancient cults in late antiquity, and records the wider recognition question as open. It also records that the movement is small, that estimates of the number of practitioners in Greece vary widely and none of them is a reliable count, and that reconstructed worship of the ancient gods is practised elsewhere in Europe and North America under other organisations with no formal connection to this one.