Organisation and divisions in the Orthodox Church in Cyprus: Post-independence events and changes in context

This paper provides an analytic framework through which one can make sense of events and changes that took place in the Orthodox Church in Cyprus after 1960. It deals, primarily, with events in the post 1973 period and, more specifically, the twenty first century. The paper addresses the historical context of these developments in order to illuminate the logic of Orthodox Church organisation. Moreover, it delineates the boundaries of groups involved in shifting alliances both within and outside the enlarged Synod and identifies the causes of internal division. The paper seeks to strike a balance between the standard ethnographic strategy of maintaining the anonymity of actors and the need to make the text meaningful to an otherwise informed readership.