SIRIGO, MELEZIO. - Byzantine orator and anti-Protestant polemicist, b. at Candia (Crete) in 1586, d. at Galata (Constantinople) on 13 April 1664.
He began his studies at Candia under Melezio Blastos and continued them in Italy, where he studied logic at Venice and mathematics and physics at Padua. Having returned to his homeland, he became a hieromonk of the monastery of Angaratto; having entered into a dispute with the Catholic governor of Candia, he fled to Alexandria in 1626 and remained there until 1629. Passing through Rhodes and Chios, he arrived at Constantinople the following year and was installed by the patriarch Cyril Lucaris in the church of Chrysopee in Galata. Involved in the continuous vicissitudes of the Byzantine patriarchate and having taken sides against the Philo-Calvinist party, he was sent into exile in 1645 to Jași, in 1648 to Shenlek in Bithynia and in 1649 to Cyprus, until the death of Parthenius II (1650) allowed him to return to Constantinople.
S.'s literary activity unfolded in the field of sacred oratory, in the composition of liturgical offices and hymns, and in the translation of certain works. But his name is remembered chiefly for the part he took in the anti-Protestant controversy. S., who on his first arrival at Constantinople enjoyed the confidence of the patriarch Cyril and of the Calvinist Antonio Leger, composed in 1638 the refutation of Lucaris's Confession: Ὀρθόδοξος ἀντίρρησις κατὰ τῶν κεφαλαίων καὶ ἐρωτήσεων τοῦ Κυρίλλου, published in 1690. In 1642 he represented the patriarchate of Constantinople at the Conference of Jași with the delegates of Kiev. On that occasion he translated into Greek the Confession of Faith of Peter Mogila, and corrected in it certain opinions, especially on Purgatory and on the moment of consecration, in which Mogila agreed with the Catholics. S.'s Greek Confession became the most celebrated among the symbolic books of the Greek Church and was printed for the first time in Holland, in 1667.
Bibliography7 works
Maurizio Gordillo