Several self-governing Orthodox churches are headed not by a patriarch or metropolitan but by an archbishop holding, within his own church, authority equivalent to a patriarch's, a title reflecting each church's particular historical path to autocephaly rather than any lesser underlying status: the Church of Cyprus is led by the Archbishop of Nova Justiniana and All Cyprus, the Church of Greece by the Archbishop of Athens and All Greece, and the Orthodox Church of Albania by its own Archbishop of Tirana, Durres and All Albania. Each of these churches reached full self-governance along a distinct historical route, Cyprus through an ancient conciliar grant, Greece and Albania through nineteenth and twentieth century national church settlements tied closely to the formation of the modern Greek and Albanian states, rather than through elevation from an existing metropolitanate to patriarchal rank as Moscow and several other churches did.
A further, much smaller case is the Church of Sinai, centered on Saint Catherine's Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai, whose head, the Archbishop of Sinai, governs what is sometimes described as the world's smallest self-governing Orthodox church, a single ancient monastery rather than a national territory, its archbishop historically also serving as the monastery's abbot, a combination of offices found nowhere else at this level of Orthodox church governance.