A Russian stooge or a Greek puppet? Joachim III’s struggle for autonomy of the Patriarchate of Constantinople (1864-1912)

Abstract

Established in 1830, Greece was the first post-Ottoman nation-state. It ambitiously aimed to incorporate all Ottoman provinces populated both by ethnic Greeks and the Slavic-speaking flock of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. In contrast, the Romanovs’ realm was the only Orthodox Great Power of Europe and one of its last dynastic confessional empires. The Russians had long acted on the flattering self-image as defenders of their suffering coreligionists who also served as the basis of their influence in the Sultan’s realm. Greek and Russian conflicting demands and expectations of a theocratic institution caught in a difficult transition reveal the tension between tradition and modernity in Eastern Europe and the Middle East at the turn of the twentieth century. This article is novel because it relies on both Greek and Russian archival and rare published sources from the 1864-1912 period. It also calls for a contingency-based approach rather than for static or linear interpretations. This kind of conceptualization contributes to the theoretical framework developed by Paschalis Kitromilides to describe the identity politics in the Orthodox Christian world after the Crimean War (1853-1856).