Various less-informed news organisations such as the Telegraph and the BBC reported that a large anti-migrant protest took place in the port of Dover from the early hours of Saturday morning to around lunch-time. Their reports detail how the so-called protesters, dressed in all black, walked around the seaside town for a bit and did some chanting.

However, to the expert reporters here at Slice of Beef, it was blindingly obvious that these “protesters” were in fact Greek Orthodox monks who had taken a wrong turn. The all black habit of the Orthodox ‘Rassophoros’, or second-tier monk, could be confused for a black tracksuit; similarly, the “balaclavas” they were supposedly wearing were in fact clerical headdresses known as ‘kalimavkia’ which had slipped down, possibly as a result of the stiff sea breeze. Their “chanting”, it should go without saying, was of the Medieval Byzantine variety.

How these Rassophores came to be in the port of Dover remains a mystery, not only to the general public, but to the monks as well. The chants of “whose streets?” that came from the crowd were not rhetorical, as the media would have you believe, instead they were simply asking where they were.

Adam Berry