The first steps of the national Church: Patriarchal elections in the Antiochian Orthodox Church in 1906 (according to reports from Russian consuls)

Abstract

For almost two hundred years, the Arab Orthodox population of Syria and Lebanon, which constituted the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch, was under the ecclesiastical authority of the Greeks. The growth of the national consciousness of the Middle Eastern Arabs caused a desire to free themselves from this power, which at the end of the 19th century led to a protracted churchpolitical conflict in the Orthodox world. For the first time in Russian science, the article examines an important episode in the struggle of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch for its independence  — the patriarchal elections of 1906. The paper is based on the reports of the Russian consuls in Damascus and Beirut, which contain valuable information about the course of the struggle for the patriarchal throne, its participants, as well as the subsequent struggle for the recognition of the new patriarch by the Greek Churches.