Patriarchate fades in Turkey
He bears ancient and august titles: Ecumenical Patriarch and Archbishop of the "New Rome" in Constantinople, the mother church of Eastern Orthodoxy since the 4th century. He is the symbolic leader of the world's 85 million Orthodox Christians. Yet when His Holiness Demetrios I presides over the Sunday Eucharist at the Church of St. George in Istanbul, the giant chandeliers cast their feeble light across ranks of empty pews. The congregation numbers only a dozen or so worshipers, most of them elderly. The historic see, once the center of half the...
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