Category: Global Orthodoxy
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St. Dionysius on the Epidemic of Alexandria
St. Dionysius the Great was Pope of Alexandria from 248 to 264. During that time, the Church of Alexandria suffered horrible persecution. Just as that was dying down, an epidemic broke out in the city, just as Pascha was approaching. St. Dionysius described the epidemic, and the Church’s response, in a letter to some of…
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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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The “Bulgarian Schism” Began 150 Years Ago
On February 28, 2020, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church will celebrate the 150th anniversary of the creation of an independent Bulgarian Church (known as the “Bulgarian Exarchate”) by decree of the Ottoman sultan. For centuries up to that point, the Bulgarian Orthodox living in the Ottoman Empire had been under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate.…
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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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From Scotland to Minorca: New Perspectives on the Beginnings of the Orthodox Church in the Modern Americas
Introduction At the turn of this century two important collections of documents came to light in the north of Scotland[i], the content of which should adjust our understanding of the first steps of the Orthodox Church in what is now the United States. Recently I was able to travel to the now Spanish Balearic island…
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Ousting the Ecumenical Patriarch: the removal of Maximos V according to CIA records
World War II ended in 1945, and immediately, the United States and the Soviet Union began jockeying for leadership in the postwar world. The Soviets swept as many countries as possible into their orbit; meanwhile, the United States adopted the Truman Doctrine, a foreign policy based on the containment of Communism throughout the world. Orthodoxy…
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Greek Archbishop to proto-CIA: “Your directions will be executed faithfully.”
It’s long been an open secret that Patriarch Athenagoras’ election as Ecumenical Patriarch was arranged, or at least facilitated, by the United States government. It’s difficult to write about this as an historian, though, because smoking guns for that kind of thing tend to be kept under wraps. Occasionally, though, something slips out. I was…