GEORGIEVSKII, EVLOGII

GEORGIEVSKII, EVLOGII, Metropolitan of Western Europe (1868–1946). Graduated from the Tula Theological Seminary in 1892 and the Moscow Theological Academy in 1894, he taught in Tula the next year and became a monastic. He was supervisor of Vladimir Seminary from 1895 to 1897, and from 1897 to 1903 rector of Chelm Seminary. In 1903 he became Bishop of Lublin and Vicar of the Warsaw-Chelm Diocese. As a member of the Moderate Rightists, he was a deputy to the Second Duma, and was one of two bishops represented in the conservative Third Duma. In October 1909 he became a member of the new Nationalist Party in the Duma, included in Stolypin’s rightist bloc-always staunchly Russian nationalist. In June 1912 he was elevated to the rank of archbishop, and the Holy Synod disallowed his election to the Fourth Duma because he refused to organize a separate clerical party. In 1914 he became head of the Diocese of Volhynia, and in April 1915 he was sent to Galicia to administer Orthodox Church affairs in occupied territories.

He left Russia in January 1920 and his see was first in Berlin, then transferred to Paris in 1922. In 1923 he was made metropolitan of all Russian Orthodox churches in Western Europe by decree of Patriarch Tikhon (q.v.), at the same time the patriarch dismissed the ecclesiastical administration of the Synod in Exile (q.v.) created by a council of emigrant bishops at Sremski Karlovci, Yugoslavia. In 1925 Evlogii established St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute (q.v.), Paris. Because of the confounding ecclesiastical situation, Evlogii’s exarchate fell successively under two patriarchates (qq.v.), Moscow from 1921 to 1931 and 1945 to 1946, and Constantinople from 1931 to 1945. He submitted to the authority of the Moscow Patriarchate in 1945, but the decision in favor by the exarch diocese was not established until after his death. His primary written work is My Life’s Path: The Memoirs of Metropolitan Evlogii, Based on His Own Accounts by T. Manukhina (in Russian). The first half of the book describes Russian church life at the turn of the century, and the second half is a detailed history of the Russian emigre church in Europe.