Metropolitan Rank Before The Patriarchates

The metropolitan office is, organizationally, older than the patriarchate: in the early centuries of Christianity, bishops of Roman provincial capitals gained informal seniority over bishops of smaller towns within the same province simply by virtue of the capital's civil importance, a pattern the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE recognized and regularized rather than invented, decades before any of the five ancient sees had settled into the fixed pentarchy of patriarchates. Several Orthodox churches never developed a patriarchal tier above their metropolitan sees at all: the medieval Church of Cyprus, granted autocephaly as early as the Council of Ephesus in 431 CE, remained governed by an archbishop and metropolitans without ever seeking patriarchal status, and Poland's and the Czech and Slovak lands' Orthodox churches, both granted autocephaly in the twentieth century, are likewise headed by a metropolitan rather than a patriarch.

Within Orthodox churches that do have a patriarch, a metropolitan governs a metropolis, a province grouping several dioceses, and in many Slavic and Balkan churches also serves as an honorific title conferred on a diocesan bishop of a historically significant see even where that bishop governs no province of subordinate dioceses at all, a usage that has broadened the title's modern application well beyond its original strictly administrative sense.