Meletios Metaxakis during his tenure as Ecumenical Patriarch
In the fall, I visited Hellenic College-Holy Cross (where I delivered this paper on the EP’s “barbarian lands” theory), and while I was on campus, I took the opportunity to visit the school’s library and track down an extremely rare collection of 232 once-classified British government documents on Meletios Metaxakis. These documents were compiled by Dr Andreas Tillyrides (now Archbishop Makarios of Kenya), who published them in 1984 under the title Meletios Metaxakis and English Diplomacy. The documents run from 1917 — just before Meletios was elected Metropolitan of Athens — up to Meletios’s death in 1935. They include detailed accounts of the drama surrounding Meletios’s election as Ecumenical Patriarch in 1921 and his tumultuous reign that ended with his exile two years later. They go on to cover the contested election for the Alexandrian Patriarchate that led to Meletios’s victory, and then later, his failed attempt to win the throne of Jerusalem.
Since these are government documents in the public domain, I’ve decided to publish them in full, for the use of anyone who wants to dig deeper into the history of Orthodoxy in this pivotal era. In time, I’m sure I will publish analyses of the documents on this website, too.
To download all of the documents, CLICK HERE. And if you want a sampling of some of the material in the collection, click here. (These links will take you to the website of my good friend Gregory; the PDF file size is too big to upload here at Orthodox History.)
EXCELLENT WORK. Great Research material. Also to note that Meletios Metaxakis was officially involved in freemasonic movements. He is the one who imported the New (pappist) Calendar in 1924 and created a Schism within the Orthodox Church. New Calendarism, a well known heresy from the 16th Century, has been anathematised over 10 times by pan-orthodox synods as a pappist innovation. The feast order (calendar) schism has only one purpose. That is that all heresies to unite together in one organisation under the World Council of Churches and to promote Ecumenism / Universalism as part of Globalisation.