Summary:
The first migrants from Southeastern Europe to reach Greece in the early 1990s found a country where almost the entire citizenry subscribed to the constitutionally recognized “prevailing faith” of Christian Orthodoxy and with it the Church of Greece. The influx of over one million immigrants including several hundred
thousand Muslim or ambivalent Albanians and thousands of co-Orthodox Bulgarians and Romanians called into question whether Church and State could remain so closely intertwined in Greece. It is argued that Church and State relations
have evolved and modernized over the course of three Archbishops’ administrations (Seraphim 1974-1998, Christodoulos 1998-2008, Ieronymos 2008-present) to cope with immigration in a way in which cooperation between the two remains close despite Greece’s more pluralistic society. Media reports, interviews
and primary sources have been gathered to help close what has been a lacuna in research on Church-State relations in Greece to this point.
