Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew celebrated the 65th anniversary of his entry into the priesthood on Thursday with a divine liturgy in the Metropolitan Church of the Dormition of the Theotokos on Imbros, the Aegean island in northwestern Turkey where he was born and where he was ordained a deacon as a 21-year-old theology graduate.
The service, held on August 13, 2026, fell on the leave-taking of the Feast of the Transfiguration — the same day of the church calendar on which he received the first degree of the priesthood in 1961, according to an account published by the Ecumenical Patriarchate.
Two other primates concelebrate
Bartholomew presided over the liturgy together with Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria and All Africa Theodoros II and Archbishop John of Tirana, Durrës and All Albania. They were joined by Metropolitans Emmanuel of Chalcedon, Meliton of Philadelphia, Chrysostomos of Myra and George of Guinea, and by Archimandrite Bartholomew, abbot of the Esphigmenou Monastery on Mount Athos.
Among those attending were Metropolitan Kyrillos of Imbros and Tenedos, the local hierarch, and Massimiliano Palinuro, the Roman Catholic archbishop in Istanbul. Mount Athos was represented by the monk Tarasios Koutloumousianos, sent on behalf of the Holy Community, along with a group of Athonite monks.
The Greek government was represented by Mairi Myrogianni, secretary general for Greeks abroad. Also present were Athanasios Martinos, president of the brotherhood of Archons “Panagia Pammakaristos,” and its vice president, Georgios Prokopiou, together with a large gathering of Archons, islanders and friends of Imbros.
Before the dismissal, the Patriarch served a memorial trisagion for the late Metropolitan Meliton of Chalcedon, who led the Metropolis of Imbros and Tenedos for 13 years and who ordained him on August 13, 1961, giving him the name Bartholomew.
Patriarch Bartholomew recalls the day of his ordination
In an address that the Patriarchate described as visibly emotional, Bartholomew retraced the day itself and several turning points in the six and a half decades of service that followed.
“I greet you with all my love, and I thank you for your gracious presence at this Divine Liturgy, full of Resurrection, in the Metropolitan Church of the Dormition of the Theotokos on Imbros, where exactly sixty-five years ago on this day I received the grace of the first degree of the priesthood.”
He remembered a church filled from early morning, his teacher of English at the island’s school chanting from the right-hand stand, and Meliton officiating in bright vestments while he himself stood, as he put it, full of emotion and anxiety.
Two phrases from that service, he said, stayed with him. The first was the name he was given: “I call you Bartholomew, in memory of Bartholomew Koutloumousianos of Imbros.” Bartholomew said he had expected to receive his elder’s own name, Meliton, but that Meliton chose instead to link him to the 19th-century Imbrian scholar-monk who combined priesthood with learning and whose work served education on the island.
The second was drawn from the Gospel reading of the Transfiguration (Matthew 17:1–9), in which the disciples, lifting their eyes, “saw no one except Jesus only.” Those words, the Patriarch said, were inscribed permanently on his soul and have served as the compass of his life.
Imbros and Halki
Bartholomew traced his vocation to his village of Agioi Theodoroi and to the Theological School of Halki, where he studied from the age of 14. He credited the island with instilling faith, a bond with the natural world and gratitude for creation — themes that have marked his public advocacy on the environment — and the school with his love of books, of the Greek language and of the encounter between learning and faith.
He was ordained a priest on October 19, 1969, in the katholikon of the Holy Trinity Monastery on Halki, at a time when the Church was preparing him to take up the chair of canon law at the school. Recalling that day, he quoted Meliton, by then Metropolitan of Chalcedon: “You are proceeding toward teaching, the teaching of the word of God. And it is the fullness of the theologian to alternate the Holy Altar with the lectern.”
The Halki seminary, the historic training ground of the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s clergy, has been closed by Turkish authorities since 1971. Its reopening remains one of Bartholomew’s long-standing requests to Ankara.
Born on Imbros — known in Turkish as Gökçeada — in 1940, Bartholomew was elected Ecumenical Patriarch in 1991. As Archbishop of Constantinople–New Rome, he holds the primacy of honor among Orthodox bishops worldwide. He returns regularly to the island in the summer months, where the once-substantial Greek Orthodox community has dwindled sharply over the past century.
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