Melbourne musician Themi Adams left hedonism behind to reclaim his name and follow a life of poverty and celibacy. | By Jordan Baker JordsBaker
Before he became a bishop, Themistocles Adamopoulos was a rock star, a Marxist and a monk., who was then known as Themi Adams, was so famous in the mid 1960s that acolytes would camp outside the family home in Melbourne. His mother would feed them coffee and cake. His sister, Mary, was more enterprising. “One morning I woke up, and my room was full of people,” he says. “She charged an entrance fee for people to watch me sleep.”.
These days, in his religious robes, Adamopoulos looks unmistakably Greek. But for many years, he did his best not to. His parents immigrated to Melbourne when he was seven, after the nationalist Egyptian revolution of 1952 left the country less hospitable to the large Hellenic community in his native Alexandria. He moved from a city rich in history – Cleopatra, Caesar, Alexander the Great – to suburban Melbourne, where he would stand outside television shops watching Mickey Mouse.
The rock star life was fun while it lasted. When Burns went solo, “I thought, I need to think about myself when I’m 40 or 50,” Adamopoulos says. “This is not going to be my future.” So he studied political science at university and became a Marxist. “During my breaks at uni, I would go down to the railway yard and try to cause strikes,” he says. “The point is to cause as many strikes as you can, so the workers rise up and take over.
But instead of stepping up to the social status his parents had hoped and sacrificed for, he began offloading his possessions and even his job, swapping his academic path for a role teaching students in an underprivileged public school. “I started selling whatever I had, and giving it to the poor,” he says. “My parents thought I’d gone crazy.”
He appealed to the Patriarch of Alexandria, who ordained him in Kenya. Within a few years, Adamopoulos had set up a dressmaking class for women, a computer school for young people, and a pre- and primary school, which also fed and clothed poor children in Nairobi. He also set up a teachers’ college, mostly funded by the Greek community back in Australia.
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