Tag: Athenagoras Spyrou
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Athenagoras: The EP is not an Orthodox Vatican
For a while now, I’ve been documenting the close relationship between the U.S. government and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras in the early years of the Cold War. It was thanks in large part to American influence that Athenagoras attained the throne in Constantinople, and he relished the idea that he was an agent of Americanism, the…
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How Did Orthodoxy Get Into This Mess?
It almost goes without saying that the Orthodox world is a mess right now. The situation in Ukraine alone is a disaster: a Russian invasion of the country backed by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) by the state, and a recognized-by-only-some Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) that was created…
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Patriarch Athenagoras, the CIA, and the State Department
Last fall, I spoke at a conference at Hellenic College-Holy Cross, commemorating the centennial of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. I’ve already posted my main paper from that conference, on the “barbarian lands” theory of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. At that conference, I also spoke briefly about Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras, who, prior to becoming Patriarch,…
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Trouble in Istanbul: The Early Years of Patriarch Athenagoras
Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras was elected at the end of 1948, thanks in no small part to the intervention of the United States government, in coordination with the governments of Turkey and Greece. Athenagoras was flown to Istanbul in January 1949 aboard a plane provided by U.S. President Harry Truman. Born in Greece, with hierarchical experience…
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Athenagoras Didn’t Want the Hagia Sophia Returned to the Church
The Hagia Sophia in Constantinople was the greatest cathedral in the Orthodox world — an architectural wonder built during the reign of St. Justinian, which, according to legend, inspired the emperor to declare, “Solomon, I have outdone thee.” Centuries later, Prince Vladimir of Kiev sent envoys to study Orthodoxy in Constantinople, and as the story…
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Chronology of Terror: The Anti-Orthodox Istanbul Pogrom of 1955
It’s well known that the Greek Orthodox population in Istanbul is infinitesimally small — estimates these days usually put the number at under 2,000. It’s also well known that most Greeks in Turkey were deported in the early 1920s as part of the forced “population exchange” with Greece under the Lausanne Treaty. But most of the…
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Athenagoras: The Apostle of America to Orthodoxy
In a previous article, I shared some of Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras’ declarations of loyalty to the United States, documented in U.S. State Department files from 1950-51. Thanks to Aram Sarkisian, I have since obtained many more State Dept. documents from the rest of the 1950s. In two of these reports, from 1953 and 1957,…
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Secret 1950 State Dept Memo on Ecumenical Patriarch
Lately I’ve begun to publish a series of articles on the relationship between the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the United States government during the early Cold War period. The most recent of those articles focused on various statements of loyalty made by Patriarch Athenagoras to U.S. State Department officials. As I said in that article, context…
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Patriarch Athenagoras’ Declarations of Loyalty to America
Thanks to my colleague Aram Sarkisian, I recently came into possession of the first batch of a trove of U.S. State Department documents related to the Orthodox Church — and particularly the Ecumenical Patriarchate — in the early 1950s. It will take me months — maybe years — to sift through all these materials and…
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There’s a Piece of the True Cross at the Truman Library in Missouri
Yesterday, I published an article about the ouster of Ecumenical Patriarch Maximos V. In that article, I mentioned that on February 10, 1947, the Greek Archbishop Athenagoras awarded President Harry Truman with a piece of the True Cross. I tracked down the cross, and it turns out that Truman held onto it, and it eventually…