An unrecognized Ukrainian Orthodox group says it has created a new “Metropolis” in Greece and appointed a Greek cleric connected to Old Calendarist circles as its head.
The announcement may at first sound like a development involving the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. It is not. The group behind the move is a remnant of the old Kyiv Patriarchate, not the recognized Orthodox Church of Ukraine led by Metropolitan Epiphanius.
That distinction matters: the names are nearly identical, and the two bodies have very different standing in world Orthodoxy.
According to the Greek ecclesiastical news site Romfea, the so-called “Patriarchate of Kyiv” accepted Iakovos Giannakis into its ranks and, by official decree, established a “Metropolis” in Greece with him as its head. Romfea described Giannakis as a defrocked former Old Calendarist archbishop.
The report says Giannakis was given the title “Archbishop of Simferopol and Yevpatoria.” That title carries more weight than it may first appear. Simferopol and Yevpatoria are in Crimea, a peninsula under Russian occupation and one of the most sensitive church and political spaces in the Orthodox world.
The Orthodox Church of Ukraine maintained a Crimean diocese under Metropolitan Klyment of Simferopol and Crimea. Separately, the Russian Orthodox Church placed the Simferopol, Dzhankoi, and Feodosia dioceses under the direct authority of the Patriarch of Moscow in June 2022, according to the Kyiv Independent.
In November 2023, RISU reported Klyment’s warning that the Orthodox Church of Ukraine had effectively ceased to exist in Russian-occupied Crimea after its clergy was forced to leave or risk mobilization into Russia’s armed forces. A Crimea Platform article in April 2024 also described the pressure on the OCU’s Crimean Eparchy and cited Klyment’s view that the eparchy had essentially ceased to exist under occupation.
So the title is not only unusual because Giannakis is being placed in Greece. It also points toward Crimea, where church jurisdiction has become inseparable from the wider conflict over Ukraine, Russia, and occupation. For a remnant Kyiv Patriarchate structure to use a Crimean title in connection with a Greek appointment reads as a territorial signal, not simply as an internal church formality.
The background reaches back to Ukraine’s long and complicated church dispute.
The Orthodox Church of Ukraine received the tomos of autocephaly from the Ecumenical Patriarchate in January 2019. The older Kyiv Patriarchate, long associated with Patriarch Filaret, was dissolved at the December 2018 unification council that formed the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.
That unity did not last cleanly. On June 20, 2019, only months after the new church received autocephaly, Filaret held a gathering under the name of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Kyiv Patriarchate) and claimed to overturn the earlier dissolution. UNIAN reported at the time that only two bishops, both from Russia, came to support Filaret, while the Orthodox Church of Ukraine rejected the gathering’s resolutions as having no canonical or legal force.
Filaret died on March 20, 2026, at the age of 97. The next day, seven hierarchs of the unrecognized Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Kyiv Patriarchate) announced the election of Archbishop Nykodym as their new head. According to Nykodym, bishops in Ukraine and abroad took part, with those outside the country joining online, the Kyiv Independent reported.
It is this group, not the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, that is now claiming a presence in Greece.
Romfea reported that Nykodym claimed a number of parishes, a monastery, and clergy had joined the Kyiv Patriarchate structure in Greece. Those claims were not independently confirmed in the report. Nykodym was also quoted as saying, “Step by step, we are establishing the Patriarchate of Kyiv.”
The announcement appears to be, at least in part, an effort by the remnant Kyiv Patriarchate to show that it remains active after Filaret’s death.
For Orthodox readers, the main issue is the language. Words like “Patriarchate,” “Patriarch,” “Archbishop,” and “Metropolis” can sound official, even when the church body using them is not recognized by the canonical Orthodox churches. Romfea itself treated the announcement cautiously, repeatedly using “so-called” and placing several titles in quotation marks.
The move also lands in a sensitive church environment. Ukraine’s Orthodox question remains one of the major fault lines in world Orthodoxy, tied to the wider dispute involving Moscow, Constantinople, and the recognized Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Greece has its own complicated religious landscape as well, with the Church of Greece, the Ecumenical Patriarchate, and smaller Old Calendarist groups that exist outside mainstream recognition.