A Declaration in 1833 and a Recognition in 1850

The separation was made by a government rather than by a synod. The Bavarian regency that governed Greece for the young King Otto declared the church of the kingdom independent of Constantinople in 1833, on the reasoning that a sovereign state could not have its bishops answering to a hierarch resident in the Ottoman capital. The model was Lutheran state-church practice, and the arrangement placed the church firmly under royal authority.

Constantinople did not accept it. For seventeen years the Greek church was in an irregular position, unrecognised by the mother church and unmentioned in the diptychs, until the Ecumenical Patriarchate issued the tomos of 1850 granting autocephaly on its own terms. The delay is remembered in Orthodox argument whenever a church declares independence without waiting, because it is the case most often cited on both sides.

The same regency also dissolved the great majority of Greek monasteries and took their property, an act carried out in the name of reform and remembered very differently inside the church. Together the two measures set the pattern of the church relationship with the modern Greek state: closely bound to it, financially entangled with it, and periodically in conflict with it. Theoklitos Farmakidis defended the state settlement and Konstantinos Oikonomos opposed it, and the argument between their positions ran for a generation.