Tag: Meletios Metaxakis

Meletios Metaxakis’s Support for St Tikhon

The 1923 Pan-Orthodox Congress is most (in)famous for proposing the Revised Julian ("New") Calendar, which was subsequently adopted by many (but far from all) of the world's Orthodox Churches. The Congress occurred at one of the most tumultuous moments in church history (you can read all about the crazy year...

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...

Classified British Documents on Meletios Metaxakis

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....

An Interview with Meletios Metaxakis

In the spring of 1919, Meletios Metaxakis was the Metropolitan of Athens and primate of the Church of Greece. World War I had ended the year before, and the Great Powers were still sorting out what the world would look like going forward. On April 27, 1919, the Atlanta Constitution...

The Origins of the ‘Barbarian Lands’ Theory

This paper was originally presented at the conference “The Greek Archdiocese at 100 Years,” Hellenic College-Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, October 7, 2022. I am indebted to numerous friends and colleagues who reviewed the paper in advance and provided feedback. I am especially grateful to M., who provided...

Meletios Metaxakis’s Failed Jerusalem Coup d’Etat

In the summer of 1908, an insurgent group known as the "Young Turks" rebelled against the Ottoman Emperor Abdul Hamid II, forcing him to restore the long-suspended Ottoman constitution. In the wake of the Young Turk Revolution, the local Palestinians in the Patriarchate of Jerusalem saw an opportunity to increase...

The Prestige of the Ecumenical Patriarchate

Fr. Kyrill Johnson Editor's note: Yesterday, I continued my series on the global Orthodox crisis of 1917-25, focusing on 1922. One of the many major events that year was the Ecumenical Patriarch Meletios Metaxakis' recognition of Anglican holy orders. In the mid-1940s, Fr. Kyrill Johnson, who knew Meletios personally, wrote...

This week in American Orthodox history (May 14-20)

May 17, 1870: The newly ordained convert priest Fr. Nicholas Bjerring celebrated his first Divine Liturgy in St. Petersburg, Russia. He didn't know Church Slavonic, so he served in German. May 19, 1884: Archimandrite Stephen Hatherly, a convert priest from England, arrived in Philadelphia. I wrote about Hatherly's visit almost...

Fr. Kyrill Johnson: The Prestige of the Oecumenical Patriarchate

Editor's note: On Monday, we introduced Fr. Kyrill Johnson, who converted to Orthodoxy in the 1920s and spent most of his career in the Antiochian Archdiocese. Then, on Tuesday, we presented an article by Johnson reviewing a Protestant translation of the Divine Liturgy. Below, we've published another article by Johnson,...

Solving the mystery: the 1921 pan-Orthodox gathering of bishops

Back in July, Fr. Andrew wrote about the above photo, which depicts a gathering of American Orthodox bishops in the early 1920s: Greeks Meletios and Alexander, Russians Platon and Alexander, and Syrian Aftimios. At the time of Fr. Andrew's original post, no one knew exactly when this photo was taken,...