Orthodox History

The Ecumenical Patriarchate at the Mercy of the Sultan

At around five o’clock in the afternoon on Holy Saturday, 1821, Ecumenical Patriarch Gregory was celebrating the Vesperal Divine Liturgy at the Phanar when Ottoman police surrounded and seized Gregory and the other bishops who were concelebrating with him. They dragged the Patriarch, fully vested, to the main gate of...

Autocephaly or Subjugation to the State? The Church of Greece after the Revolution

The Greek War of Independence began 200 years ago, in 1821, and one of the big consequences of the war was the estrangement of the Orthodox Church in revolutionary Greece from its mother church of Constantinople. From the beginning of the revolution until 1833, the ecclesiastical situation in Greece was...

Turkish Interference in the 1972 Ecumenical Patriarchate Election

Athenagoras Spyrou was elected Ecumenical Patriarch in 1948 thanks largely to the influence of the United States government, particularly Secretary of State George Marshall. At the time, Marshall had consulted the powerful Greek-American businessman Spyros Skouras, and Skouras recommended the Athenagoras, who was then the Archbishop of the Greek Archdiocese...

Jerusalem Wasn’t Really Autocephalous from 1669-1845

From the fall of the Byzantine Empire until the 17th century, it was customary for the Patriarch of Jerusalem to appoint his own successor, usually by making the chosen heir the Metropolitan of Caesarea. In 1666, Patriarch Nektarios of Jerusalem appointed his 25-year-old archdeacon, Dositheos Notaras, as Metropolitan of Caesarea,...

Was Alexandria Really Autocephalous in the 19th Century?

The Patriarchate of Alexandria was founded by the Apostle Mark, at a time when Alexandria was essentially the second city of the Roman Empire, after Rome itself. Largely because of this, in the earliest centuries of church history, the Church of Alexandria was second only to Rome in preeminence among...

Protopresbyter Pontius Rupyshev – a spiritual light from Vilnius

I serve in Vilnius Cathedral of the Dormition which is the historical cathedral of the Orthodox Church in Lithuania. Today it functions as a simple parish, our metropolitan lives and mostly serves the Divine Liturgy in the monastery of the Holy Spirit. It was so already in the 19th century...

An Ecclesiastical Coup d’Etat & the Pan-Orthodox Council of 1973

Archbishop Makarios III of Cyprus was also the first President of Cyprus, serving three terms between 1960 and his death in 1977. He survived four assassination attempts and a coup d'etat, and in the early 1970s, he was in a difficult position -- his life was constantly in danger and...

A Tribute to Bishop Basil of Wichita

Bishop Basil Essey, the longtime Antiochian Bishop of Wichita and Mid-America, is preparing to retire at the end of this year. Many Antiochians learned of this for the first time over the weekend, when the Archdiocese held a virtual convention. Metropolitan Joseph announced Bishop Basil's retirement in his address to...

The End of the “Greek Captivity” of Antioch

For most of the 18th and 19th century, the Patriarchate of Antioch was controlled by ethnic Greeks rather than the local Arabic-speaking people. The Patriarch was always a Greek, a member of the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre, which controlled not only Antioch but also Alexandria and Jerusalem. (Today, Jerusalem...

The Phanar vs. the French Revolution

In 1797, revolutionary France conquered the Republic of Venice, and, with it, the Ionian Islands, which were a Venetian possession but were inhabited by Greek Orthodox Christians. The next year, the Russian, British, and Ottoman empires formed an alliance with the aim of, among other things, driving the French out...