by Stefano Caprio

The Synod has elected the three candidates to succeed Ilia II, who had led the Georgian Church since 1977. The candidate with the most votes was the 57-year-old Metropolitan Shio, who had in fact already served as regent alongside the elderly patriarch for ten years. But this transition is extremely delicate, because in a deeply polarised country and against the backdrop of the clash between Moscow and Constantinople, the Georgian Orthodox Church is not merely choosing a person or a development programme for its future.

The Holy Synod of the Georgian Orthodox Church has selected three candidates for the office of Catholicos-Patriarch of All Georgia. Following a secret ballot, the Locum Tenens of the Patriarchal Throne, the 57-year-old Metropolitan Šio (Mudžiri) of Senaki and Čkorotsku, received the highest number of votes, with 20 out of 39 bishops supporting his candidacy, making him the clear favourite to succeed the late Patriarch Ilja II, thus becoming the 142nd Patriarch of Georgia under the name Šio III.

Metropolitan Job (Akiašvili) of Ruis-Urbnisi and Metropolitan Grigol (Berbičašvili) each received seven votes. The candidates also included Bishop Grigol Katsia of Tsalka, Bishop Melkhizedek Khaščidze of Margveti and Ubisi, and Bishop Dosifej Bogveradze of the Diocese of Belgium and the Netherlands, representing other regions within and outside the Georgian Church.

The election of the new patriarch is not merely the canonical resolution of the ecclesiastical governance of a national Church, as is the regular practice in all Orthodox Churches worldwide. Above all, it marks a turning point of epoch-making significance in terms of succession: Ilia II had led the Georgian Church since 1977, spanning the Brezhnev-era Soviet period, the perestroika of Mikhail Gorbachev and his principal supporter Eduard Shevardnadze, the first president of post-Soviet Georgia from 1995 to 2003, right up to the most recent years of conflict with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the secession of the territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia (whose bishops were not admitted to the Synod) and the internal clash between the pro-Russian sovereignists of Georgian Dream and the pro-Western liberals of the National Movement.

Ilia II thus enjoyed unquestioned authority, superior to that of any politician – a status that cannot be attributed to any successor – having steered the Church as an institution capable of protecting the Georgian people through the storms of oppressive and unstable regimes, civil wars and external conflicts, in a region as historically ‘explosive’ as the Caucasus, particularly its southern part. And prior to these events of the last century, one should recall the many phases of the founding and reconstruction of the Orthodox Church, beginning with the origins of the conciliar era, at the end of the Roman Empire.

The Caucasus is, in fact, the border region between Europe and Asia, where the ancient Christian states of Georgia and Armenia have managed to preserve and defend their faith and their peoples (dozens of different ethnic groups coexist in Georgia), sandwiched between the Muslim countries of Turkey, Azerbaijan and Iran. The Church of Georgia disputes with that of Armenia the antiquity of being a ‘Christian state’: the Armenians proclaimed this even before the conversion of Emperor Constantine, whereas the Georgians remained tied to their dependence on Constantinople, remaining ‘Apostolic Orthodox’ as opposed to the Armenian ‘Apostolic Monophysites’, who did not subscribe to the dogmatic declarations of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, the very council that established the definition of ‘Orthodoxy’, the true faith of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.

According to Byzantine tradition, the Church in Georgia was founded by the Apostle Andrew the First-Called, who, in the hagiographic narratives from Byzantium, travelled to the Caucasus before reaching the banks of the Dnieper, prophesying the future birth of Kiev, and even the northern lakes where the first Russian city of Novgorod would appear. In what was then called Iberia, the future Georgia, the other apostles also arrived: Simon the Canaanite, buried in a village near present-day Sukhumi (capital of separatist Abkhazia), and the “thirteenth apostle” Matthias, also buried near the port of Batumi. According to other sources, the apostles Judas Thaddeus and Bartholomew also came to this region, having preached the Gospel in neighbouring Armenia.

Georgia has a population of fewer than 4 million, although it has recently been seeing an influx of Russian and Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war, and is therefore one of the smallest Churches in terms of population among the fifteen autocephalous Orthodox Churches. Yet the choice of the new patriarch affects the balance of the entire global Orthodox world more than that of many other larger Churches. The Mother Church of Constantinople itself is reduced to the Greek minority in Turkey, despite having universal influence and jurisdiction, whilst Greece itself remains in a lower canonical status, unable to challenge the ecumenical primacy of the 86-year-old Bartholomew II (Archontonis), who has held office in Constantinople since 1991. All the other Churches, from the Balkans to Moscow, came into being much more recently than Tbilisi: Moscow secured its patriarchate in 1589, and the others only in the 19th century, with the national uprisings against Ottoman Turkish rule. Attempts by the Bulgarians and Serbs to establish themselves as independent patriarchates in ancient times were immediately suppressed, leaving them under Byzantine jurisdiction.

Orthodoxy is currently experiencing a very dramatic schism, following the rift between Moscow and Constantinople in 2019 over Bartholomew’s granting of autocephaly to the Ukrainian Church. Since then, Patriarch Kirill (Gundjaev) of Moscow has assumed a universal role to preserve the ‘true faith’ against ‘Western’ degradation, caused by Constantinople’s submission to American and European policies – a controversy that has been ongoing for centuries with various iterations.

The alignments with one Church or the other are ambiguous: Churches of clear Greek ethnicity, such as Athens and Alexandria in Egypt, openly support Bartholomew, whilst on Moscow’s side the only ones to declare themselves clearly are the Patriarchates of Antioch and, indeed, that of Tbilisi, which, precisely because of its antiquity, is particularly important for Russia’s prestige.

The global division between the Eastern and Western ‘armies’ is therefore often inspired and shaped by the hostilities of the Churches’ ‘spiritual armies’, as is particularly evident in Ukraine, where all these jurisdictions have been clashing for several centuries now; for this reason too, the new Georgian patriarch will have to assume positions of great influence not only ecclesiastically, but also politically and ideologically on a universal scale.

The Georgian Orthodox Church is therefore not merely choosing a person or a development programme for its own future, but is determining the extent of its political influence. One wonders how independent the bishops of the Georgian Synod will be in their choice, and whether a “Georgian-style conclave” will be able to distance itself from the “battle for the thrones” that is tearing global Orthodoxy apart, as well as from the constant internal political instability in Georgia, and to make the choice best suited to the Georgian Church itself, rather than to Moscow or the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the Georgian Dream or the opposition.

The synod fathers’ search for a compromise is expressed in their shared desire to avoid a schism, since the Church’s authority in Georgian society will inevitably diminish with the passing of such a prominent political figure as Patriarch Ilia II.

However, the contours of the compromise are still too vague: the candidate must be ‘neither yours nor ours’, that is, neither a declared supporter of Constantinople nor a declared pro-Russian, neither a staunch Westerniser nor a fervent Russophile, neither a reformer nor a reactionary. The only problem is where to find such a candidate, in a situation where both the Georgian Church and Georgian society as a whole have developed for decades within a polarised paradigm.

The current problem facing the Georgian Orthodox Church stems from the fact that, throughout the post-Soviet period, Georgia has been an arena of struggle between external actors, and consequently informational, ideological and material support has been provided only to two poles, both in society and within the Church.

The symbol of the former was the ‘priest with the EU flag’, whilst the symbol of the latter was the ‘priest with the stool’, as in a well-known episode from 2013, when certain clergy behaved aggressively during a march in support of the ‘LGBT movement’, which is recognised as extremist and banned in Russia. Both sides need their own personal victory, not some abstract and incomprehensible “peace”; there is simply no room in this Georgian context for a healthy centrist position, for the idea that the Church is apolitical.

A telling example was also an episode in 2024, when the “favourite” Šio attempted to reconcile the two factions of the Church: the Metropolitan’s words, according to which “love will help to resolve differences peacefully”, fell on deaf ears, and supporters of “traditional values” accused him of “manoeuvring” and “caving in to the opposition”, whilst advocates of European integration simply ignored his words on peace, instead detecting “anti-Western statements” in the Metropolitan’s speech.

Šio is, however, the only figure recognised throughout Georgia and, in a sense, could become a figurehead capable of ‘elevating’ the Georgian Orthodox Church and enabling it to remain in the public sphere.

Although still relatively young, he has in fact governed the Georgian Church for almost ten years, during the final phase of Ilia II’s life, and the ecclesiastical public is generally conservative and wary of change.

The paradox of the ecclesiastical situation in modern Georgia is that the more “pro-Russian” the future patriarch proves to be, the less influence he will have in Georgia, and the more uncontrollable and “anti-Russian” the entire Georgian Orthodox Church will become.