The Deanery of Great Britain and Ireland is part of the Archdiocese of Orthodox Parishes in Western Europe which has been within the jursidiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople (Istanbul) since 1931.

 

The head of the Archdiocese is Archbishop Gabriel of Comana, pictured right, who is also Exarch of Western Europe.

The Exarchate traces its origins to the episcopal service of Metropolitan Evlogii, who in the late 1930s felt himself unable to guide his flock of the Russian Orthodox Church within the embrace of the Moscow Patriarchate, given the atheistic influence of Communism in Russia after the revolution of 1917. Metropolitan Evlogii sought to carry forward his service under the protection of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. The Exarchate therefore sees itself as the successor of the earlier ‘Provisional administration of the Russian parishes in Western Europe’ founded by Patriarch Tikhon (later St Tikhon) of Moscow and entrusted to Evlogii in 1921.

The Exarchate was closed in 1965 by Patriarch Athenagoras I (through a letter dated 22 November), with an assembly meeting the following year (16–18 February 1966) noting that such provisional ethnic structures were no longer necessary, given that the passage of several generations had allowed immigrants to become accustomed to their new lands, which were now made up of more and more converts to the faith.

The Exarchate remained closed until 22 January 1971, when it was reinstated by the same Patriarch Athenagoras I - again under the Omophorion of the Ecumenical Patriarch, but with internal autonomy of organisation. This status was blessed by Patriarch Bartholomew I in 1999, 19 June, who, according to the Exarchate's own account 'recognised the full autonomy of the Archidiocese in administrative, pastoral and material terms'