September 24, 2012
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The police on Monday said the man was arrested on the island of Evia on Friday after the state cybercrime unit received "thousands of online complaints...from various countries around the world," reports news service AFP.
The Facebook page mocking Elder Paisios was dedicated to 'Elder Pastitsios', a reference to pastitsio, a popular Greek dish of pasta and ground beef.
It showed a monk with his face covered in pastitsio slop.
The police said the page, which was yanked off the web and unavailable on Monday, contained "blasphemy and insults against Elder Paisios and Orthodox Christianity" in general.
The neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party had filed a complaint in parliament on the issue last week.
Elder Paisios, a monk who lived in the monastic enclave of Mount Athos in northern Greece and died in 1994 at the age of 70, is honored by Orthodox Christians all over the world.
According to many Orthodox, he foresaw the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus and Greece's present economic crisis.
In July, the Facebook page moderator described how he had sent to Orthodox and nationalist blogs a fictitious story about a drug addict saved by a Paisios miracle as he lay dying in hospital.
The tale was uncritically reproduced online and even ended up on the front page of a nationalist newspaper with over 3,000 readers, the hoaxer said.
The arrested man could face a fine of up to 3,000 euro or two years in prison under Greece's blasphemy laws.
