Orthodoxy after 1821 — the National Churches

Under Ottoman rule the Orthodox of the Balkans had been governed as a single religious community answering to the Patriarch of Constantinople. The Greek revolt of 1821 — which opened with the hanging of Patriarch Gregory V at the gate of his own residence — broke that arrangement apart, and as each new nation won independence its church claimed self-government. Greece declared its church self-governing in 1833 and was formally recognized by Constantinople in 1850, Bulgaria won an imperial decree creating a national exarchate in 1870, Serbia was recognized in 1879 and Romania in 1885. In 1872 a council at Constantinople condemned phyletism — organizing the church by ethnic nation rather than by place — even as national churches went on multiplying anyway. What the century produced was not one church breaking up so much as a family of them, each with its own synod, its own language of worship, and its own claim on a people.