During the 400 years of the Turkish Occupation, the Hellenic clergymen endangered their lives to preserve the Hellenic language, the history, the national conscience, and the Truth of our Faith by founding and maintaining the "secret school" in countryside chapels, little monasteries, or elsewhere under conditions of strict illegality. It is due to this spiritual leadership that the Hellenic nation escaped from the darkness of illiteracy, into which the conquerors wanted it to sink so as to keep it enslaved, and it was through these schools that the Faith was preserved and passed on.