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GREEK CHURCH 



patriarchs, suppressed the patriarchate of Moscow 

 and confided the government of the Church of 

 Russia to a synod composed of five or six bishops 

 and a number of lay dignitaries, all appointed by 

 the czar, who remained supreme head of the church. 

 In Russia there are several dissenting sects. 



The Church of Georgia ( ancient Iberia ) dates 

 from the time of Constantine, when Nina, a Chris- 

 tian slave, converted the king and his people. It 

 first formed part of the patriarchate of Antioch, 

 and was subsequently transferred to that of Con- 

 stantinople. But since the annexation of Georgia' 

 to the Russian empire the archbishop of Tiflis has 

 been a member of the Russian synod. 



The Montenegrins, who never acknowledged the 

 suzerainty of the sultan, did not admit the juris- 

 diction of the Constantinopolitan patriarch. They 

 were governed, since 1697, when they formally pro- 

 claimed their independence, by a ' Vladika or 

 prince-bishop of their own, chosen from the family 

 of Petrovid, and who exercised both spiritual 

 and temporal power. In October 1851, however, 

 Danilo I., on succeeding his uncle, the last Vladika, 

 abandoned his ecclesiastical functions, and assumed 

 the temporal title of hospodar or prince. The 

 bishops of Montenegro have since been consecrated 

 by the Russian synod. 



In Austria-Hungary there are over three mil- 

 lion orthodox Christians, principally of the Servian 

 and Roumanian nationality, besides four million 

 Uniats. Of the former, who are there known as 

 Byzantine Greeks, about half a million are scattered 

 through the Austrian dominions, and the rest are 

 in Hungary, with two archbishops ( Carlowitz and 

 Hermannstad) and eight bishops, six in Hungary 

 proper, and two in Croatia. The archbishops exer- 

 cise their jurisdiction under Austria. 



In England a Greek Church has existed since 

 the middle of the 17th century. The periodical 

 emigrations of Greeks to the west, consequent 

 upon each fresh recrudescence of Turkish tyranny, 

 resulted in the formation of a Greek colony in 

 London, which must have been considerable both 

 in numbers and position ; for we find that many 

 young Greeks were sent to Oxford, as a rule to 

 St John the Baptist (Gloucester) Hall, where they 

 replaced the Irish, who, after the establishment of 

 Trinity College, remained in Dublin. A certain 

 Nathanael Conopius, however, was at Balliol, 

 where he first taught the Oxonians to make coffee, 

 and whence he was expelled by the Puritans in 

 1648. When the Archbishop or Samos, Joasaph 

 Georginos or Georgirenes, had to flee from his dio- 

 cese, and arrived in England about 1666, he found 

 amongst his co-religionists in London Daniel 

 Bulgaria as priest, but there was no church. He 

 therefore applied to the then Bishop of London, 

 Henry Compton, who befriended him, and who 

 with other English bishops collected a small fund, 

 to which even King Charles II. is said to have 

 contributed, for the erection of a Greek church on 

 a piece of land in Crown Street, Soho Fields, 

 given by the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields. 

 (See A Description of the Present State of Samos, 

 Nicaria, Patmos, and Mount Athos, by Joseph 

 Georgirenes, Archbishop of Samos; Lond. 1678.) 

 This church, which was dedicated to St Mary 

 the Virgin's Sleep, is still extant, and a marble 

 tablet over the west door bears an inscription in 

 Greek recording these facts, as well as the names 

 then given to Greek Street and Compton Street 

 in the same neighbourhood commemorate those 

 events. The church, which is the one repre- 

 sented in Hogarth's well-known picture of 'Noon,' 

 soon passed to the French Protestant refugees ; it 

 was subsequently fitted up as a meeting-house for 

 the Rev. John Rees, and in 1850 it was recon- 

 secrated as an Anglican church, to St Mary the 



Virgin (Ecclesiologist, xi. 120). A copy (made 

 about 1760) of the original register, which seems 

 to have perished, of that first Greek community 

 exists in the chapel of the Russian embassy in 

 London (Welbeck Street), and records the fact 

 that when the Archimandrite Gennadius was 

 priest in London, both the church and the com- 

 munity had become ' Grseco- Russian.' After the 

 death of Gennadius (February 3, 1737), who Avas 

 buried in St Pancras' Churchyard, the entries in 

 the register record more and more frequent mar- 

 riages between English and Greeks, who thus 

 appear to have been absorbed hy the indigenous 

 element, their anglicised names which are still to 

 be met with (Rodos, Pamphylos, Lesbos, &c. ) con- 

 firming the fact. But in the beginning of the 19th 

 century another Greek community sprung up in 

 London by the arrival in 1818 from the island of 

 Chios of three out of the five brothers Ralli, who 

 founded the great firm of that name, and who 

 were soon followed by others of their country- 

 men. They at first met at a chapel in one of 

 the houses in Finsbury Circus, and in 1847 built 

 a church in London Wall. As the community 

 increased in riches and in numbers, this modest 

 building was replaced in 1879 by a magnificent 

 Byzantine church in Moscow Road, Bayswater, 

 built after the model and bearing the hallowed 

 name of ' Hagia Sophia.' Flourishing Greek 

 churches exist also in Liverpool and in Manchester. 



In the United States there are a Greek church 

 in New Orleans and a Russian in San Francisco. 



The Church of Greece offers a strong instance of 

 the causes which militate against dependence upon 

 a jurisdiction subject to the will of the sultan. 

 The Greek struggle for freedom, which carried with 

 it the active sympathy of the whole Greek nation, 

 was, at the dictate of the sultan, put under the 

 ban by the patriarch Gregorius, who, nevertheless, 

 was soon afterwards hanged for complicity in the 

 national cause. In the second year of the war the 

 Assembly of the Greeks at Epidauros proclaimed 

 (1822) the orthodox church as church of the new 

 state, and the Royal Decree of 15-27th July 1833 

 organised the church on a plan similar to that of 

 Russia, with a synod of five bishops, presided over 

 by the Archbishop of Attica. A lay government 

 commissioner attends the deliberations, but may 

 not vote. The synod is the supreme ecclesiastical 

 tribunal, and elects bishops under the continuation 

 of the crown. The clergy are excluded from all 

 participation in politics, and are not eligible to sit 

 in the legislature. In 1850 the patriarchate of Con- 

 stantinople acknowledged the independence of the 

 Church of Greece, which has already rendered to 

 the other Greek-speaking churches great services in 

 the education and training of priests. Of the large 

 number of convents which existed in Greece, many 

 were destroyed during the war of independence, 

 and others have been utilised for educational pur- 

 poses. Of those still extant the Meteora in Thes- 

 saly and Mega Spileon in the Peloponnesus are the 

 most notable for extent and historical interest. 



The Church of Servia existed, under the early 

 Servian kings, as an independent church, with a 

 patriarch at Belgrade (1300). The Turkish con- 

 quest disorganised that church, and, in 1679, 37,000 

 Servian families emigrated to Hungary under 

 Arsenius Czernowitz, and established the see of 

 Carlowitz. In 1765 the Servian patriarchate was 

 suppressed by the Turks, and the Servian Church 

 placed under the jurisdiction of the patriarch of 

 Constantinople. When the semi-independence of 

 Servia was achieved under Kara George (see 

 CZERNY), in 1810, the government of the church was 

 again transferred to the metropolitan of Carlowitz. 

 Finally, in 1830, Servia declared her church auto- 

 cephalous under the Bishop of Belgrade. 



