Under Ottoman rule the archbishop acquired a civil role alongside the ecclesiastical one. The empire governed its Christian subjects through their own hierarchies, making the senior bishop responsible for taxation, for representation and for the conduct of his community, and the Cypriot archbishop accordingly became ethnarch, the head of the people, in a sense that had nothing to do with liturgy. The office survived the end of Ottoman rule as an expectation, and it shaped what the church did next.
The clearest expression of that inheritance is that Archbishop Makarios III was elected the first president of the Republic of Cyprus in 1960 and held both offices at once. Very few churches anywhere have combined primacy and head of state in one person in the modern period, and the arrangement drew criticism from inside the church as well as outside it.
The church remains a substantial institution beyond worship. It holds significant property, runs schools and charitable foundations, and its interventions in public argument are reported as national news. Its structure was reorganised in the twenty-first century with new metropolitan sees created and the synod enlarged. The northern part of the island has been outside its effective administration since 1974, and the condition of church buildings there has been a continuing subject of dispute and of international heritage concern.