The title of this paper raises a problem at the very outset. What is meant by ‘the Rumanian Orthodox church’ when one is talking of a period before the notion of ‘Rumania’ had been conceived? In this paper it will be taken to mean the Orthodox church as it existed in the principalities of Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania from the fourteenth century and has continued in those territories to the present day.

A few words first about the prehistory of the Rumanian Orthodox church as thus defined. The Roman province of Dacia had been created by Trajan in AD 106, and the administration had been withdrawn south of the Danube by Aurelian in 271, after which the territories in question were controlled first by the Goths and then by a succession of other invaders for about ten centuries. During this millenium they remain for us in a darkness lit by very few rays. It is therefore not surprising that there is little evidence for church organisation north of the Danube during this period, especially when we remember that the Dacian lands ceased to belong to the empire half a century before Christianity became a tolerated religion. The first church building so far discovered in the lands north of the lower Danube is at Sucidava, a bridgehead held by the Romans after their withdrawal, destroyed by the Huns in 447, and refounded by Justinian in his first years as emperor. This basilica is apparently from Justinian’s time, and being in a bridgehead, may be presumed to have depended on a church organisation south of the Danube.

I am very sorry for being the instrument through which some of these unprincipled Greeks, for their own selfish aims, troubled our Archbishop’; in March 1926 Llewellyn H. Gwynne, anglican bishop in Egypt had good reason to feel sorry, though perhaps not quite as much reason as his critics supposed. His apparently maladroit intervention in the name of the archbishop of Canterbury in the election of a new Orthodox patriarch of Alexandria had been maliciously exploited to produce results entirely opposite to his intentions and caused serious embarrassment both to archbishop Davidson and to the British government. But his behaviour, though certainly injudicious, was not so entirely incomprehensible as it originally seemed. An examination of the episode in its context will not only explain Gwynne’s behaviour but more importantly shed light upon the complex set of circumstances, attitudes and assumptions which have conditioned relations between Greek Orthodoxy and the church of England in the twentieth century. Any such relationship involves also the relations of centre and periphery, of personal ambitions, party objectives, strategic processes and the larger international religious systems of anglicanism and orthodoxy.

The enforced emigrations caused by political or religious conflicts have often been an enriching and stimulating factor in the cultural history of mankind.

Lenin’s dictatorship based on red terror forced more than a million Russians to flee from their own country and settle down in various parts of the world. The Russian diaspora included a great variety of people, among them many well-known men. It will suffice to mention a few names: Ivan Bunin (1870–1953), Dimitry Merezhkovsky (1865–1941) in literature; Sergy Rachmaninov (1873–1943) and Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) in music; Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944) in painting; Fedor Chaliapin (1873–1938) and Anna Pavlova (1881–1931) in the theatre; Mikhail Rostovtsev (1870–1952) and Georgy Vernadsky (1887–1973) in history; Igor Sikorsky (1889–1972) in aviation; Nikolay Menschokov (b. 1900) in geology. All these people made a substantial contribution to the contemporary world of art and learning.