A Metropolitanate Argued Over for Six Centuries

The see founded at Kyiv was a metropolitanate of the patriarchate of Constantinople, and its later history is a sequence of disputes about who it belongs to. After the Mongol destruction of the city the metropolitans moved north and eventually to Moscow while keeping the title of Kyiv. The Union of Brest in 1596 took part of the church into communion with Rome, creating the Greek Catholic church that keeps the eastern liturgy under papal authority and that remains a major body in western Ukraine. Peter Mohyla, metropolitan in the seventeenth century, founded the academy at Kyiv that trained clergy for the whole region and reorganised Orthodox theology in response.

In 1686 Constantinople issued a document transferring the Kyiv metropolia to the patriarch of Moscow. Three hundred and thirty two years later Constantinople declared that transfer to have been temporary and revoked it, and in January 2019 granted a tomos of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Moscow broke communion with Constantinople in response, and a substantial church remains in Ukraine under the Moscow Patriarchate, so the country now has two Orthodox jurisdictions with rival claims to the same inheritance.

The Soviet period sits between those events. Churches were closed and clergy imprisoned or killed, and Saint Michael's Golden-Domed monastery in the centre of the city was demolished with explosives in the 1930s. It was rebuilt in the 1990s. The question of which body should hold the Caves Lavra has been contested since 2022.