Details of the conflict between Patriarch Bartholomew and Archbishop Anastasios of Albania over the Ukrainian church issue are revealed

Archbishop Anastasios of Albania, who passed away in January last year, privately expressed deep bitterness in the last weeks of his life about what he described as a “fratricidal war” waged against him by Constantinople because of his theological position on the Ukrainian Church. This became known from his close associate. According to OrthoChristian, this revelation was made at a memorial event dedicated to the memory of the late Archbishop, which took place at the University of Athens.

Among the speakers was the Archimandrite of Athos, Father Theologos Chrysanthakopoulos, an architect and engineer who worked closely with Archbishop Anastasios in Albania. Father Theologos spoke about his last meeting with the Archbishop in Tirana on December 15, 2024, just a few days before the illness of the First Hierarch of the Albanian Church. ” He called me to his office that evening, and we had a long conversation,” Father Theologos recalled. “He was fiercely opposed to the fratricidal war of Phanar against him personally because of his uncompromising theological position on the Ukrainian issue. He suffered and grieved over the schism in Orthodoxy in recent years and prayed for its unity. Bitterly, he told me: ‘We have not concelebrated with the Patriarch for six years’.” These details, according to OrthoChristian, were voiced with reference to a video of his speech published by the Union of Orthodox Journalists.

Archbishop Anastasios was widely known for restoring the Albanian Orthodox Church from the ruins after decades of communist persecution, which became one of the most prominent examples of church restoration in the modern era. In the last years of his life, he also became famous for defending canonical Orthodoxy in Ukraine, personally writing two historical and theological studies in which he demonstrated that Constantinople’s granting of the Tomos of autocephaly to the so-called “Orthodox Church of Ukraine” was anti-canonical.

OrthoChristian previously reported that Archbishop Anastasios received abusive letters from the hierarchs of Constantinople and was accused of blasphemy by a hierarch of the Church of Alexandria for his support of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Other clerics and commentators of the Church of Constantinople also criticized him on the same grounds.

Father Theologos also noted that Ukrainian autocephaly, instead of uniting Orthodox Christians in Ukraine, as its supporters had hoped, only deepened the split among the Ukrainian people and spread discord and schism throughout world Orthodoxy.

Earlier, the Primate of the Albanian Orthodox Church, His Beatitude Archbishop John, spoke out on the Ukrainian church issue. The First Hierarch drew attention to the fact that the creation of the OCU split world Orthodoxy, noting that the Synod of the Albanian Church had expressed its position on this issue and it remains unchanged.