Metropolitan Elpidoforos: Halki Seminary ready, set for an historic re-start

By George Gilson

That an issue concerning a religious institution and religious freedom might preoccupy an international economic conference at Delphi might seem a bit unusual to most at first blush.

In fact, it is in an odd way perfectly fitting that the place which in ancient Greece was considered the centre or omphalos of the earth - and a place where representatives from the entire Greek world sought counsel from priests and the divining high priestess Pythia who thus became privy to the innermost thoughts and strategies of all the city-states that flocked there, laying bare their most intractable dilemmas - hosted a discussion of another religious institution with a global reach, the Ecumenical Patriarchate, and of the pressing need for Ankara to permit the operation of the patriarchate's Halki Theological Seminary, which it shut down in 1971.

Byzantium itself was created by settlers from Megara who were instructed to go there by the Delphic Oracle, centuries before Constantine made it the seat of his empire. The Christian Church of the city that took his name, the Great Church of Christ and Ecumenical Patriarchate, second in rank only to Rome, became and remains the omphalos and diplomatic epicentre of the entire Eastern Orthodox Christian Church.

The address to the Delphi Forum of Metropolitan of Bursa (Prousa in Greek) Elpidoforos Lambriniadis on the past and future of the Halki Theological Seminary was not a lament for an injustice that has lasted nearly half a century, but rather an unveiling of ambitious plans for the institution that nurtured and bred patriarchs and theologians.

In the nearly eight years since Ecumenical Patriarch Vartholomeos entrusted Elpidoforos (the patriarch himself gave him the name...

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