The Albanian Orthodox Church: A Political History, 1878–1945 by Ardit Bido

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Albanian Orthodox Church: A Political History, 1878–1945 by Ardit Bido Ines Angeli Murzaku Ardit Bido. The Albanian Orthodox Church: A Political History, 1878–1945. Routledge Religion, Society and Government in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet States. London: Routledge, 2020. 256 pp. In a recent paper presented at the conference “World Orthodoxy: Primacy and Conciliarity in the Light of Orthodox Teaching” (September 16, 2021), organized by the Synodal Biblical-Theological Commission of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Serbian Orthodox Bishop of Bačka, Irinej, explored autocephaly in the Orthodox Church. According to Irinej, autocephaly has become “a wall of temptation and a stumbling block” to strengthening the Orthodox faith and Orthodox Church unity. The bishop explained autocephaly from concept to execution, and the pitfalls of weaponizing and politicizing the granting of autocephaly, which, according to him, do not serve the soteriological goal of salvation of souls. For Irinej, the local bishops and the local episcopal council have the primacy of electing a primate for their local church with no vetting from a higher authority (i.e., Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople), with the condition that the decision be accepted by all sister Orthodox churches. All the other aspects of autocephaly are of secondary importance or are “mere details” that do not define the autocephalous status of an Orthodox church, according to Bishop Irinej. Bishop Irinej’s September 2021 paper demonstrated that the issue of autocephaly continues to haunt the life of the Orthodox Church; the issue is pertinent and imminent, and it requires a dispassionate scholarly analysis devoid of local politics and ecclesiastical manipulations. Such is the focus of the 2020 book The Albanian Orthodox Church: A Political History, 1878–1945, by Dr. Ardit Bido, general director of the Archives of Albania and lecturer at the Metropolitan University of Tirana, Albania. The book is part of the series Routledge Religion, Society and Government in East Europe and the Former Soviet States. If Bishop Irinej’s proposed solutions to the granting of autocephaly applied to the Albanian case, its course and recognition would have been straightforward. Instead, the local bishops and the Holy Synod voted for autocephaly twice, but the approval from the mother church of Constantinople took decades to arrive, leaving the Orthodox faithful of Albania disappointed and the church in disarray. Bido’s analysis stands faithful to the monograph’s title and offers a detailed and chronological analysis of events divided into six substantial chapters: the origins of the Albanian ecclesiastical cause (1878–1918), which led to the establishment of the Albanian Church (1918–21) on the heels of the reestablishment of the Albanian state (1920); the self-proclamation of autocephaly (1921–24), explaining the Greek and Ecumenical Patriarchate reactions to Albanian autocephaly, which were in direct response to Greece’s defeat in the Greco-Turkish War (1919–22); the struggle for the recognition of auto-cephaly (1924–28); the establishment of the Albanian Holy Synod and the Congress of Korça (1928–29); the official recognition of Albanian autocephaly by the mother church of Constantinople in 1937; and, finally, the coming of one of the most brutal communist regimes of Eastern Europe in 1945, which made Albania the first atheist nation in the world in 1967. The book explores sixty-seven years of Albanian history, focusing on ecclesiastical-political-societal history and Albanian Orthodoxy’s fifteen-year quest for recognition—a quest that involved a highly complex, unpredictable, and political situation between secular and ecclesiastical neighboring powers: on one side, the Albanian and the Greek states, and, on the other side, the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. Bido provides much-needed scholarly background and analysis that is accessible to the [End Page 147] Albanian and Balkan specialist and student, as well as to the amateur in Balkan ecclesiastical matters. The book effectively explores the critical historical-political factors that caused the quest for autocephaly. Bido starts with an analysis of the League of Prizren (1878), an important resistance Albanian movement, which protested the transfer of Albanian-inhabited territory from the Ottoman Empire to Montenegro and represented an impetus of Albanian nationalism. He includes discussions of the politicization of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople under the Greek...