Category: Global Orthodoxy
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The Athens Gospel Riots of 1901
At the end of the 19th century, the Russian-born Queen Olga of Greece commissioned her private secretary to translate the four Gospels into Modern Greek to make them more accessible to the ordinary laypeople.…
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Orthodoxy in Ukraine: A Brief Overview
Even before the current war, the landscape of Orthodoxy in Ukraine was incredibly complicated, and any attempt to summarize it will inevitably fail to do the subject justice. This is compounded by the fact…
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The Longest Schism in Modern Orthodoxy: Bulgarian Autocephaly & Ethnophyletism
In 1767, the Ottoman Empire suppressed the autocephalous Archbishopric of Ohrid and subordinated its Bulgarian Orthodox people to the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Beginning in the early 1830s, the Bulgarian Orthodox subjects of the Empire began…
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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…
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Orthodoxy’s Holy War and the Ecumenical Patriarchate
In a previous article, I wrote about the Ecumenical Patriarchate during the challenging years of 1840-52, leading up to the Crimean War. During this period, the Ottoman government repeatedly meddled in the internal affairs…
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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…
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The Ecumenical Patriarchate on the Eve of War, 1840-1852
The great Ecumenical Patriarch Gregory VI was deposed by the Ottoman authorities in 1840. After this, next few Ecumenical Patriarchs came and went in rapid succession: after a year on the throne, Anthimus IV…
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The Patriarch Who Defied the Ottoman Empire
Previously, I told the story of the Ecumenical Patriarchs from the outbreak of the Greek Revolution in 1821 until the resignation of the weak and ineffective Patriarch Constantius II in 1835. Today we’re…
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The Ecclesiological Vision of Patriarch Bartholomew
Thirty years ago, October 22, 1991, the 51-year-old Metropolitan Bartholomew of Chalcedon was elected Ecumenical Patriarch, inaugurating a new era in not only the Patriarchate of Constantinople but the Orthodox Church globally. One of…
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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…