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Romanian Autocephalies & the Birth of the Modern Patriarchate of Romania
Today I’m going to try to tell the story of how the Romanian Orthodox Churches became independent. You’ll notice that I said “Churches,” not “Church” – that’s because, in the 19th century, there were…
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When Did Today’s Autocephalous Churches Come into Being?
The oldest autocephalous church in the world attained its current form in 1845. Today, depending on whom you ask, there are fourteen or fifteen or maybe sixteen (or seventeen?) autocephalous Orthodox Churches in the…
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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…