EXARCH

EXARCH. A political term of the Byzantine (q.v.) state, an exarch was an official who had charge of a province at some distance from the capital and was endowed with military powers as well as civil authority. The term thus came to signify in Byzantine church use a bishop charged with the oversight of a flock that lay outside the Empire’s effective boundaries, or else simply the ruling bishop or eparch (q.v.) of a primatial see. Today the former use still obtains in the Orthodox Church. Thus, for example, in the United States the archbishop of the Greek Archdiocese is also the exarch of the Ecumenical Patriarch for the Americas.