1. Family background – the first years

“The corpse of the elderly great philanthropist was accompanied to his final resting place by all the people of our city. He was accompanied by the paupers whom he gave to eat […] he was accompanied by the Church, from the highest officials to the poor priests […] he was accompanied by the social class he belonged to […] he was accompanied by the whole aristocracy of wealth […] he was accompanied by the officials […] he was accompanied by his nation…”¹

In this way, the newspaper Neologos of Constantinople referred to the crowd that attended the funeral of George Zarifis in the cemetery of Sisli in March 1884. Indeed, it was a funeral that received wide publicity, as the obituaries, the number of telegrams of condolences to Zarifis family, the number of funeral wreaths by individuals, associations, institutes and schools as well as the off the record details from the funeral process had been filling the press columns for several days later. The wide presence of public and officials in his funeral was not accidental, because the deceased played significant role in what is happeningin Constantinople and elsewhere. His great and successful business career, his charities, his involvement in associations and educational matters, in the affairs of the Patriarchate and the antagonisms about it provide the historian with rich material.

He was of Thracian origins, born in 1809, offspring of John Zarifis and Teresa Kaplanoglou. He had also six siblings. His father sent him to study in the famous lyceum Richelieu in Odessa and, after his graduation, he moved in Greece for few years and worked as secretary in Karytaina. He left Greece in 1843 as “unsettled heterochthon” and settled in Constantinople. His settlement there was the beginning of a longstanding career. His marriage with Helen Zafeiropoulou, daughter of Stephen Zafeiropoulos, sealed the cooperation between the two men and led to the establishment of “Zarifis Zafeiropoulos” enterprise, which was going to play a key role in banking matters in the Ottoman capital.

2. Business activities

The business activities of Zarifis involved commerce and banking and, besides his personal skills, they were also based on a net of partners with ties of kinship. The enterprise in Constantinople cooperated with the trading house “Zafeiropoulos, Sons Co” in Marseille, with Alexander Zarifis - relative of George and trader in Odessa-, as well as Odysseus Negroponte, offspring of a family of ship-owners and merchants in Bucharest, who married Sofia, Zarifis’ daughter, in 1869. The kinship and intermarriages were instrumental, not only in the beginning of his activities, but also later. His son, Pericles, the founder of the firm “Zarifis, Sons Co” in Marseille, married Fani Rodokanaki; the other son, Leonidas, married Froso, the daughter of the merchant Nicolopoulos, and their daughter would be married to Etienne Eugenidis.

Despite the impressive net of intermarriages, George Zarifis was the most famous and successful businessman who co-ordinated with the changes in the economic environment of the Ottoman capital and gaining a prominent position among the bankers of Galata. He developed successful and profitable activities mainly in the field of banking and in joint stock companies. Zarifis was involved actively in the creation of joint stock companies, as the General Society of the Ottoman State, the Ottoman Society of Changes and Values, the Bank of Constantinople, the Austrian-Turkish Bank and others, and he cooperated actively with many capitalists, such as Andreas Syggros, Paul Stefanovic Skylitsis, Christakis Zografos, Stefan Scouloudis etc. In an era during which the import of capital from abroad was directed tothe external borrowing of the Ottoman state and the establishment of Ottoman Bank and its privilege to issue banknotes, capitalists like Zarifis took the best advantage of the gaps created by the development of external borrowing and they invested in the short-term domestic debt of the Ministry of Economics. Zarifis really excelled in this field using not only his own funds but also that of other capitalists. He led the efforts for the successful settlement of the domestic borrowing, while ensuring his own interests and those of the investors he had mobilized. For this purpose, he surely used his close personal relations with the sultan Abdul Hamit. The settlement of 1879, according to which the Ottoman state would put six indirect taxes under the control of the creditors of the domestic short-termdebt, was based on his own initial plan.² The final settlement of the Ottoman public debt in 1881 covered both the European capitalists and the bankers of Galata and, in a great degree, it was based on the settlement of 1879.

3. The educational and philanthropic activity

Business was not the only field that Zarifis got active. The wealthy Greek living abroadshowed a lot of interest in philanthropy and education and he was involved in both of them as a sponsor. To the extent that the boundaries between philanthropy and education were blurred in the Ottoman Empire, in the sense that the schools were financed as institutions just like the charity organizations, his activity should be correlated to the institutional development of the Greek communities in Constantinople and other cities in the Ottoman territory. For instance, Zarifis offered great sums to the Greek Philological Association, whose activities and library were financed by him. He participated also in the construction of the Great School of the Nation (1875), covering the 9/10 of the expenses for its grandiose building, the establishment of Zarifis Schools in Philippoupoli, offering 1.000 pounds per year for their function, the Schools of Bursa etc. These actions were part of a vision to develop Greek-Orthodox schools that took place from the 1860’s onwards and it was intensified after the establishment of the Bulgarian Exarchate and the schism in 1872. Zarifis had direct contacts with the Greek Orthodox scholars who were behind this policy and he took part in the alliance between “Logios and Kerdoos Hermes” that was formed in the beginning of 1870’s.

Zarifis shared this vision for the cultivation of the Greek identity in the Ottoman Empire with many of these scholars, but he always kept his distance from the irredentist nationalist policy of the Greek state. His stance toward the Greek state was skeptical. In one case, he refused to undertake the issue of the Greek (war) loan of 1867 in Constantinople, presupposing that it would be unsuccessful and adding that: “the warm zealots would say in return that with this [loan] we make armies and gain provinces. I answer that it is impossible to gain provinces in this way. The way is to construct roads in Greece, eliminate the banditry and balance the budget. In order to achieve this, the Constitution must be suspended and Greece be attached tothe patriotic feelings of the king”.³ Furthermore, his investments in Greece were limited and they were always correlated to the condition of the money market in Constantinople. However, he followed Syggros and the others in financing the first loans of the Greek state after 1879 and, like many other bankers, he bought a big farm in Thessaly (Sofades) just before the annexation of this territory to Greece.

Zarifis was so skeptical toward the Greek irredentism, like the whole circle of bankers in Constantinople, that he suggested a plan to the British ambassador for the creation of a Greek-Ottoman Empire with the simultaneous dissolution of the Greek state. This plan stemmed from the anxiety of the Greek-Orthodox elite of Constantinople during the Great Eastern Crisis (1875-1878) and the “panslavic treat”, but also it depicted his preference for a unified economic Ottoman space rather than the fragmentation resulting from the creation of small national states. It seems that Zarifis had measured rightly the positive effects of the Ottoman reforms on the improvement of the economic position of Greek-Orthodox. For this reason, it seems that he changed stance toward those scholars who had a central position in administrating the educational policy of the Greek Literary Society, such as Herocles Basiadis and Spyros Voutyras, who were particularly moved by the irredentist perspective. As a result of this shift, Zarifis spearheaded the creation of the brotherhood “Love Each Other”, which was founded by Joachim III in 1881 with the explicit aim of giving the control of funds for schools to the Patriarchate and marginalizing the Greek Literary Society and its influence.

Eventually, his activities in the educational matters was political, directly linked to the developments and correlations in Constantinople, as his stance showed when he supported the proposal for the convention of Ecumenical Council which would declare the Bulgarian Exarchate schismatic despite the fact that this proposal was made by nationalist circles. Being directly involved in the circles that competed for the control of the Patriarchate, it seems that he was behind those moves that brought Joachim II (1860-1863, 1873-1878) and Joachim III (1878-1884, 1904-1912) to the throne. The ecumenical policy of the last one, which met with the suspicion of the Greek government, was compatible with the political intentions of Zarifis and it facilitated their cooperation. Zarifis passed away in a critical transitional period for the Greek-Orthodox people and the Patriarchate, while the ecumenical circles got deprived of a powerful ally.