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3 Russia and the Patriarchate of Constantinople 3 Russia and the Patriarchate of Constantinople: Official and Unofficial Relations 3.1 Reforms in the Patriarchate The reforms in the Ottoman Empire of the 1850s and 60s had a direct bearing on the Orthodox Church. Up to the middle of the 19th century the church, as the head of the Orthodox millet, enjoyed relative independence in the Ottoman state. The contacts between the Russian government and church and the Greek high clergy were out of control of the Subleme Porte and thus seemed unsuitable both to the Ottomans and to the western powers. The Tanzimat, by contrast, intended to gradually secularize the state and deprive the church of its privileged position. On one hand, it sought the transfer of church real estate to the Ottoman state, on the other, to lessen Russian influ- ence on Turkish affairs. The first attempt at administrative reform of the Patriarchate of Constantinople was made in 1847. The author of the reforms at that stage was the British ambassador, Stratford Radcliffe, who proposed including three laymen in the Patriarchal Synod. In 1848, however, these reform proposals were turned down and declared uncanonical.122 Further movement towards reform started after the hatt-i-humajun of 1856. As the Russian ambassador in Constantinople, A. P. Butenev, stressed: This false and poorly composed document was created and imposed on the Turks by the western powers more because of their hatred of Russia and fears of her political and ecclesiastical influ- ence in the East than because of their real care for the Christian population in the Ottoman state. This has caused great confusion in the Patriarchate of Constantinople.123 In April 1857 the Sublime Porte demanded that the patriarchate implement the reforms. The first step should have been the formation of a national church council with the participation of a Turkish official. Nonetheless, the activities of the council, though met with strong resistance from the elder members of the Synod (gerontes) and from the rising Bulgarian nationalists, finally led to the adoption, in 1860, of new rules for church administration (Genikoi kanonismoi).124 The most discussed questions during the preliminary sessions were the swearing of oaths to the state by the newly-appointed bishops and the adoption of salaries for priests. Both were 122 D. Stamatopoulos, Metarrythmisi kai ekkosmikeusi. Pros mia anasynthesi tis istorias tou Oikou- menikou Patriarheiou ton 19o aiona (Athens, 2003), 37-67. 123 Sobranije mnenij i otzyvov Filareta mitropolita Moscovskogo i Kolomenskogo po delam pravo- slavnoj cerkvi na Vostoke (St. Petersburg, 1886), III. 124 Edition: Genikoi kanonismoi peri dieuthetiseos ton ekklesiastikon kai ethnikon pragmaton ton ypo ton oikoumenikon thronon diatelounton othodokson christianon ypikoon tou soultanou (Constantino- ple, 1900). See more on the reforms: D. Stamatopoulos, Metarrythmisi kai ekkosmikeusi, 77-152. © 2014 Lora Gerd This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. Reforms in the Patriarchate 41 deemed uncanonical and thus were not adopted. The most effective modernization was the creation of the Mixed Council, the second chamber in the patriarchate in addition to the Synod. It would consist of twelve members, bishops and laymen equally, and according to the new rules, the members of the Synod would change every two years. The patriarch was thus limited in his previous unlimited de jure power. He would be answerable henceforth to the Synod in church affairs and to the Mixed Council in the civic ones. The Synod would not include members with central administrative experience because they would be elected for two years only. The changes in both chambers led to intrigues and internal struggles between factions. The patriarchal see remained unstable in spite of the reforms: in the years 1860-1912 ten patriarchs held the position and two of them were in office twice. The Mixed Council allowed for more lay influence in church policy. The Church of Constantinople shifted towards further politicization and nationalization. Extreme Greek nationalism, far from the traditional super-national ecumenical character of the patriarchate, was the new guiding spirit, made possible by the Mixed Council. It resulted in sharpening the other nationalistic sentiments in the church, Bulgarian, Antiochian, etc.125 The attitude of the Russian foreign office to the reforms was at first positive. The diplomats, especially the ambassador, Lobanov-Rostovskii, found them useful for restoring legality and guarding against corruption in the church. Some diplomats at the beginning of the 20th century also approved the reforms and said that they had been “conservative in the best sense of the word”.126 Others were much more skeptical and supposed them harmful for the Orthodox church in the East. “A strong power is needed for church administration, and its position should be above inter- nal factions”, wrote G. Trubeckoi.127 The Metropolitan of Moscow, Filaret Drozdov, the head of Russian church policy in the 1850s and 60s was an opponent of these reforms. Without discussing the political side of the question, he stressed the unca- nonical character of the reforms.128 If the Mixed Council controlled the finances of the patriarchate and adopted salaries for the clergy, that would, in his view, weaken the church, as well as the national unity and strength of the Greeks. Although the church administration implemented by the reforms was in place in the decades prior to the First World War, other changes were also made. In 1869 Patriarch Gregorios VI began the practice of appointing six of the twelve members of the Synod according to his own preferences (kat’ aristindin); this right was preserved 125 Ibid., 229-349. 126 P. Mansurov, Konstantinopol’skaja cerkov’. Ocherk osnovnyh nachal stroja ee v XIX veke, chast’ I. Central’noje upravlenije (Moscow, 1909), 66. 127 Count G. T[rubeckoj], “Rossija i Vselenskaja Patriarchija posle Crymskoj vojny, 1856-1860 gg. Po neizdannym materialam”, Vestnik Evropy, 3 (1902): 9-10. 128 Sobranije mnenij i otzyvov Filareta, 9, 14-15, 20, 29. 42 Russia and the Patriarchate of Constantinople: Official and Unofficial Relations by his successors. By the 1880s one can see that the same experienced archbishops tended to hold sway in the patriarchate. This partly recalls the period of gerontismos, which dominated to the end of the 1850s. Additional committees were also formed: the Patriarchal Central Committee, the Patriarchal Central Pedagogic Committee, the Committee of the Estates, and so on. This can be regarded as a reaction to the compen- sation to the general Kanonisms. Up to the middle of the 19th century the Patriarchate of Constantinople was a supra-national religious organization of different nations—Serbs, Bulgarians, Roma- nians and Arabs. In the middle of the 19th century it began to disintegrate province by province as a result of the formation of national states in the Balkans. In 1833 the independent Greek Church was proclaimed (recognized by Constantinople only in 1850),129 in 1865 the Romanian (recognized in 1885), in 1870 the Bulgarian. The Bulgarian Schism of 1872 was the peak of the hostilities between the Greeks and the Bulgarians. The two churches broke off relations and the Bulgarians were treated by the Greeks as heretics up to 1945. By the middle of the 1870s, the patriarchate had lost most of its European dioceses, and as a result its financial problems increased, its authority diminished and it became the church of the Ottoman Greeks. With the formation of the Mixed Council its national character increased. The neophanariots of Constantinople, represented by the lay members in the Council, were more or less patriots of the Great idea. The same could be said about most of the Greek metro- politans at the end of the 19th century. Nevertheless, the old Byzantine ideology of Constantinople’s domination over the whole Orthodox world continued to live on in the consciousness of the patriarchal clergy. This provoked indignation in St. Peters- burg, where an alternative ecumenical ideology prevailed, that of the pre-eminence of Russia in the Orthodox world. In the 1960s, Metropolitan Filaret Drozdov took up the matter of the Russian Synod with Patriarch Sophronios. He found fault with the title, “Ecumenical See of Constantinople”. “The Ecumenical See”, he wrote, “has the connotation of ecumenical power; but the patriarch does not have that power. The title “Ecumenical” belongs to the patriarch only as an honorary one. St. Basil the Great is also called ecumenical teacher, but we cannot, on that basis, call the See of Caesarea ecumenical.”130 Later, in the 1880s, the Russians avoided the term “ecumenical” altogether.131 129 Ch. A. Frazee, The Orthodox Church and Independent Greece 1821-1852 (Cambridge, 1969). 130 Sobranie mnenij i otzyvov Filareta, 155. 131 See, for example, a letter of the priest of the Russian embassy to Professor I. Troitskii (April 17, 1888), CGIA SPb, f. 2182, op. 1, d. 168: 17, and the polemics between I. Troitskii and T. Filippov in 1886 (in the previous chapter). Joachim III: First Patriarchate 43 3.2 Joachim III: First Patriarchate The first patriarch after the Russo-Turkish War was Joachim III (1878-1884).132 Joachim had been metropolitan in Varna (Bulgaria) and Thessaloniki (Macedonia), so he was well acquainted with the national issues of church life. After the war he worked enthu- siastically to improve the position of the church and addressed its difficulties, both financial and ethnic. Russia’s place in the church was one of the important points in his political program. His pro-Russian position caused an open conflict with the Greek prime minister, Charilaos Trikoupis.133 Russian diplomats, in turn, supported Joachim in his struggle against the sublime porte in support of the rights and privi- leges of the patriarchate. The period after 1878 is known in the history of the Constantinople Church as the first stage of the struggle for its rights and privileges (Pronomiakon zitima).
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