ΕΑΝ ΠΡΟΤΙΜΑΤΕ ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ ΠΑΤΗΣΤΕ ΤΗ ΣΗΜΑΙΑ ΣΤΟ ΚΑΤΩ ΜΕΡΟΣ ΤΗΣ ΟΘΟΝΗΣ
OUR MAIN IMAGE: An artistic rendition of the overwhelming rejection of Ukrainian Autocephaly and strong pro-Russian sentiment among the Orthodox faithful of Greece and Cyprus
Despite years of Western diplomatic advocacy – resembling extreme propaganda and agitation – the Ukrainian church project has encountered substantial rejection in Greece and Cyprus, including from the symbolically powerful monasteries of Mount Athos and Kykkos.
By Helleniscope’s Editorial Team
The Churches of Greece and Cyprus did, at the institutional level, formally accept the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU): in Greece through the 2019 synodal process and Archbishop Ieronymos’s subsequent recognition of Epiphanius, and in Cyprus through Archbishop Chrysostomos II’s commemoration of Epiphaniy and the Holy Synod’s decision not to overturn that course. Yet these official acts are often treated as if they demonstrated a corresponding consensus throughout Greek-speaking Orthodoxy. They did not.
Formal recognition by a primate or synodal majority did not mean that every hierarch, monastery, or cleric accepted the OCU in practice or entered into liturgical communion with its representatives. Significant bishops in both Greece and Cyprus continued to dispute Epiphanius’s canonical status or the legitimacy of the process, and many have not concelebrated with OCU clergy. The divisions on Mount Athos and the opposition associated with the exceptionally influential Kykkos Monastery further show why institutional recognition alone gives an incomplete picture of the depth and weight of ecclesiastical dissent.
PHOTO: The staunchest fighters against the heretics of Ukraine’s Autocephaly / OCU: Mesogaias Nikolaos, Kythiron Seraphim, Piraeus Seraphim, Corfu Nektarios.
Greece: significant episcopal opposition
- At the decisive 12 October 2019 meeting of the Church of Greece, seven metropolitans openly dissented or requested postponement of the Ukrainian decision.
- They were Daniel of Kaisariani, Seraphim of Kythira, Andreas of Dryinoupolis, Nikolaos of Mesogaia, Germanos of Elis, Kosmas of Aetolia and Acarnania, and Seraphim of Karystia.
- Metropolitan Nektarios of Corfu, absent from the decisive meeting, separately urged the hierarchy to postpone recognition and seek broader Orthodox agreement.
- Metropolitan Seraphim of Kythira has remained among the strongest critics, disputing both Epiphaniy’s canonical ordination and the procedure through which recognition was obtained.
- The Greek hierarchy nevertheless formally accepted Constantinople’s right to grant autocephaly and authorized Archbishop Ieronymos to proceed; therefore, episcopal dissent must be distinguished from the Church of Greece’s official position.
PHOTO. Despite repeated visits by US ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, the overwhelming majority of Mt. Athos rejected autocephaly for Ukraine and Epiphanius.
Mount Athos: a particularly important measure of rejection
- Mount Athos consists of 20 sovereign monasteries, giving its collective attitudes exceptional symbolic importance throughout the Orthodox world.
- In the first major Athonite confrontation over Epiphanius in 2019, contemporary accounts reported that only five monasteries favored official representation at his enthronement, while two abstained and thirteen opposed participation.
- Epiphanius’s October 2025 pilgrimage again showed an uneven picture: several monasteries received him, including Iviron, Xenophontos, Stavronikita and Simonopetra.
- Reception, hospitality, formal recognition and Eucharistic concelebration are not identical, so claims that a fixed number of monasteries “recognize” the OCU require careful definition.
- The larger point nevertheless remains: the Holy Mountain has never displayed anything approaching unanimous enthusiasm for the OCU, despite its jurisdictional relationship with Constantinople.
Cyprus: seven hierarchs opposed Archbishop Chrysostomos’s course
- When Archbishop Chrysostomos II began commemorating Epiphaniy in 2020, four hierarchs immediately objected: Athanasios of Limassol, Nikephoros of Kykkos, Isaiah of Tamassos and Bishop Nicholas of Amathous.
- At the decisive November 2020 Synod, the division was 10–7, with seven hierarchs voting against Archbishop Chrysostomos’s recognition policy.
- The seven opponents were the hierarchs of Limassol, Tamassos, Kykkos, Morphou, Neapolis, Ledra and Amathous.
- Thus recognition prevailed canonically within the Cypriot Synod, but more than 40 percent of its members opposed the Archbishop’s course.
PHOTO: The famous Kykkos monastery in Cyprus
Kykkos cannot be treated as merely “one vote”
- Metropolitan Nikephoros of Kykkos and Tylliria headed an institution whose influence greatly exceeds what a simple one-bishop-one-vote calculation suggests.
- Academic research describes Kykkos as arguably the wealthiest monastery in Cyprus and documents enormous historical landholdings, commercial enterprises, lending and urban property.
- By 1879, its recorded holdings alone included 15,148 skales of land, 72 shops, 22 mills, extensive vineyards and thousands of olive trees.
- In modern times, Kykkos remained a major property owner, investor and cultural institution, making its opposition financially, historically and symbolically more important than its numerical representation suggests.
Greek opinion has historically been very sympathetic to Russia
- A 2017 Pew survey found that 64% of Greeks viewed Russia favorably and 50% expressed confidence in Vladimir Putin, exceptionally high levels within Europe.
- A separate University of Macedonia poll that year found 57.5% favorable toward Russia and 67% favorable toward Putin, with 41.5% trusting Putin on international affairs.
- Support declined sharply after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but Greece remained an outlier: 34% still expressed confidence in Putin in Pew’s 2024 survey, the highest level among the European countries polled.
- Pew reported another six-point rise in Greek confidence in Putin in 2025, illustrating that Greek attitudes continue to differ significantly from much of Western Europe.
- These surveys measure the Greek public as a whole, not specifically churchgoing Orthodox Christians, and they do not directly poll attitudes toward Ukrainian autocephaly.
PHOTO: One of Geoffrey Pyatt’s visits (this time with Sam Brownback) to Archbishop Ieronymos. The way they have been acting on “religious diplomacy” and Ukraine, they have turned the line between “CIA operator” and “diplomat” very “blurry,” to say the least…
U.S. diplomacy was unusually active around the church question
- Washington did not conceal its support: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo formally welcomed Ukrainian autocephaly in January 2019 as part of U.S. support for an independent Ukraine.
- Pompeo later explicitly praised the Greek and Alexandrian Churches for recognizing the OCU, linking the issue to resistance against Russian influence.
- U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, ambassador to Ukraine from 2013–16 and Greece from 2016–22, repeatedly engaged Greek political and ecclesiastical circles during the controversy.
- In May 2019, Pyatt accompanied U.S. religious-freedom ambassador Sam Brownback to Archbishop Ieronymos; contemporary reporting states explicitly that they discussed the Ukrainian Church question.
- Brownback then visited Mount Athos, meeting its civil governor, representatives of the Holy Community, an abbot and monks from several monasteries.
- Brownback publicly acknowledged that U.S. officials had met Ukrainian religious and government leaders and that Washington supported their chosen church structure and Constantinople’s action.
- Pyatt’s earlier tenure in Kyiv included the 2014 Maidan crisis; the leaked Nuland–Pyatt conversation documented U.S. officials discussing preferred Ukrainian opposition figures and possible governmental arrangements.
- That recording demonstrates substantial American political involvement, although characterizing the 2014 change of government itself as a U.S.-organized “coup” remains a contested interpretation.
PHOTOS ABOVE: From the countless meetings between Pompeo and Bartholomew / Elpidophoros
- Pompeo – who has served as Director of the CIA and head of the State Department – also met Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in Istanbul in November 2020; the State Department officially described the meeting as concerning regional religious issues and religious freedom. Her had countless other meetings with AB Elpidophoros; he was given awards, and God only knows how close his ties are with Karloutsos – who has been consistently acting (accompanied by his “Archons of Disaster” as a CIA agent.
- Taken together, these episodes establish a sustained U.S. diplomatic and influence campaign around Ukrainian ecclesiastical independence. Given that the Athens “Embassy” allegedly controls about 70% of Greek journalists, one can imagine the level of propaganda in Greece but also the level of rejection by the Greek people.
Greek affinity with Russia is older than contemporary politics
- The relationship reaches back well before the modern Russian Federation and cannot be explained simply through present-day political messaging.
- Russia’s victory over the Ottoman Empire under Catherine II produced the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774, greatly expanding Russian commercial access to Ottoman waters.
- Subsequent arrangements enabled many Ottoman Greek merchants and shipowners to operate under Russian protection and, in practice, under the Russian flag, greatly expanding their commercial opportunities.
- The islands of Hydra, Spetses and Psara developed powerful merchant fleets whose vessels and experienced crews later formed the nucleus of the revolutionary Greek navy.
- Recent scholarship cautions that Russian-flag privileges involved complicated legal arrangements and were sometimes exploited beyond what Ottoman authorities formally permitted.
PHOTO: From a 2005 pilgrimage of Vladimir Putin to Athos. Putin’s mother was deeply Orthodox and insisted on baptizing, defying the risks of the communist regime.
Adrianople, more than Navarino, illustrates Russia’s direct leverage
- The Battle of Navarino in 1827 was an important joint British-French-Russian intervention, but Russia subsequently fought the Ottoman Empire directly in the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–29.
- Russia’s victory compelled Sultan Mahmud II to sign the Treaty of Adrianople on 14 September 1829, accepting the London arrangements concerning Greece.
- Greece’s own Foreign Ministry records that Article 10 obliged the Ottoman Empire to accept the 1827 Treaty of London and the March 1829 London Protocol, including the proposed Greek frontier.
- Contemporary diplomatic history later noted that Russia’s role raised concerns that it might gain the prestige of having emancipated Greece, encouraging the other powers to move toward full Greek independence.
- Complete independence followed with the London Protocol of February 1830 and the final international settlement establishing the Kingdom of Greece.
PHOTO: Greek shipowner Prokopioy was among the many who defied Western sanctions and carried russian oil in recent years.
The shipping legacy remains visible today
- The extraordinary maritime tradition that grew from Hydra, Spetses, Psara and the wider Greek merchant diaspora survived far beyond the revolutionary period.
- In 2025, the Greek-owned fleet comprised about 5,800 vessels and 19.1% of global deadweight tonnage, while controlling more than 61% of the EU-controlled fleet.
- It would be overly simple to attribute modern Greek shipping entirely to Catherine II, but Russian commercial privileges were an important structural factor in the rise of the merchant marine that later served the Revolution. For example, the Greek shipowners broke the British blockade of Napoleon in 1807-11 and were rewarded with gold, literally. They made so much money that, a few years later, many of them financed the Greek Revolution of 1821. Notably, today Greek shipowners show the same disrespect for Western “sanctions” of Russia, and therefore offer the only true expression of Greek interests. Herlleniscope has repeatedly suggested that they should be given a permanent advisory board within the Foreign Ministry in Athens.
- The shipowners’ position identifies 100% with the interests of Hellenism. They state: “We are the ‘taxi drivers’ of the oceans, and we are hired by those who pay the higher rate. As a maritime power, we are aligned with the Western maritime powers (Britain earlier, the US now), but we are ready to do business with all nations.” PERIOD.
Recognition does not mean consensus
The formal recognition of the OCU by the Churches of Greece and Cyprus should not be mistaken for broad acceptance among bishops, monasteries, clergy, or the faithful. In Greece, seven hierarchs openly dissented at the decisive 2019 meeting, other prominent bishops called for postponement, and Mount Athos has remained notably divided. In Cyprus, seven of seventeen hierarchs opposed Archbishop Chrysostomos’s course, including the head of the exceptionally influential Kykkos Monastery.
The deeper picture is one of substantial grass-roots and monastic rejection of the Ukrainian ecclesiastical settlement, even where official recognition was achieved at the top. Many hierarchs have continued to withhold concelebration with OCU clergy, and the limited reception of Epiphaniy on Mount Athos shows that formal recognition did not automatically translate into acceptance on the ground.
This rejection also exists in a society with unusually strong and durable pro-Russian sentiment. Greek public opinion has repeatedly shown sympathy for Russia and Vladimir Putin at levels far above those in most of Western Europe. Those attitudes draw not only on shared Orthodox identity, but on a long historical memory: Russian protection helped expand Greek shipping under Catherine II, and Russian military pressure on the Ottoman Empire in 1829 was a major factor in securing the settlement that led to Greek independence.
Ukrainian autocephaly was therefore introduced into an environment where popular historical sympathies, monastic authority, and key sections of the hierarchy often clashed with the geopolitical direction promoted by Western governments. U.S. officials—including Geoffrey Pyatt, Sam Brownback and Mike Pompeo—openly supported the OCU and repeatedly engaged Orthodox leaders in Greece, Mount Athos and Constantinople. Whatever terminology one prefers—diplomacy, lobbying, influence-building, propaganda or agitation—the central fact remains: official recognition did not erase deep ecclesiastical rejection or Greece’s enduring popular affinity with Russia.
October 2, 2026, www.helleniscope.com, n.stamatakis@aol.com
DISCLAIMER: The views and statements expressed in this article constitute constitutionally protected opinions of this author.
