Philergos.
Magazine Essays Philological, Scientific and Biomechanical.
1877--1878? Monthly
Constantinople (Galata), Turkey. Language: Greek.
Editor: Angelos Nicolaides/Nikolaides.
1/1, January 1877.
48 pp.

Noted in "Coup d'oeil retrospectif pour l'annee 1878," Revue Spirite 22/1, January 1879, 3, as a new journal of the preceding year in Constantinople. The volume for 1878 is called "Second Year." In July 1878 the journal carried a Greek translation (preserved only in H.P. Blavatsky's Scrapbooks) of Blavatsky's "The Cave of the Echoes: An Appalling Tale of Retributive Justice Inflicted by an Earth-Bound ‘Spirit,'" which had appeared in the Banner of Light in March. This was one of Blavatsky's "Nightmare Tales," in which a woman and her lover kill her husband, only to be exposed and the truth revealed ten years later when a shaman makes the murdered man's astral form take over a child's body and accuse the murderers -- who promptly confess all. The article was later published in BCW, 1:338-353.

The journal and the translation were the work of Angelos Nicolaides, who founded one of the first Theosophical Societies outside the United States, in Constantinople, in 1877 or 1878, and who was called by Blavatsky "the richest Editor of the country, who has a dozen of papers at least." H.P.B. Speaks, 108. By its title ("lover of work," "hard worker") and subtitles the journal was not specifically devoted to spiritualism and may have been the publication of the "Philergos Society" founded in 1866 to encourage the poor, regardless of religion or ethnicity, to work hard, but Nicolaides had become a devoted spiritist by the mid-1870s. In 1876-1877 he published through his own press in Constantinople Greek translations of three of Kardec's works on spiritism. Spiritualism had to Turkey and the Levant in 1859 and the early 1860s through the activities of Edmondo Rossi de Guistiniani, John Porter Brown (the author of The Dervishes and Oriental Spiritualism, 1868, and Honorary Counsel in Constantinople), James Martin Peebles (the American Counsel in Trebizond in 1869), and others. See Üzgür Türesay, "Between Science and Religion: Spiritism in the Ottoman Empire (1850s-1910s) in Studia Islamica.

Blavatsky's Scrapbooks are finally being digitized and are being put online at https://en.teopedia.org/lib/HPB-SB-7, 250 and 293, from which the copies presented are gratefully taken.

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