15 August 2026
The years 2020 to 2022 formed a dramatic and compressed backdrop for Orthodox church life in Scandinavia. The coronavirus pandemic closed churches, restricted services and forced parishes into digital forms. The practical limitations simultaneously intensified internal tensions: questions of who had the right to be present, the boundaries of the lay role, authority and trust. In several parishes the already existing conflicts were sharpened under the pressure of infection-control rules and isolation.
Then came 24 February 2022. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine fundamentally changed the landscape. Questions that had previously been internal church matters – jurisdiction, canonical affiliation, the commemoration of names – suddenly became moral and political. For many Ukrainians in the diaspora, connection with the Moscow Patriarchate became unacceptable. At the same time thousands of refugees arrived in Norway and the other Nordic countries. They needed not only housing, work and school places, but also a place to pray, to baptise their children and to be buried. The established Orthodox structures were not always equipped to meet this need quickly or with the necessary confidence.
These two years of crisis coincided with profound changes that were already under way. The dissolution of the Paris Exarchate in November 2018 had left the parishes that followed the Russian liturgical tradition in a canonical grey zone. The choices made in the following months – to place themselves under the Greek Metropolitan Cleopas, to follow Archbishop Jean into the Moscow Patriarchate, or to seek refuge under the Serbian or Bulgarian Church – proved to have lasting consequences. At the same time the Greek Metropolis under Cleopas continued to be marked by financial investigations, departures of clergy and public distrust.
All of this led to departures. In certain parishes a significant part of the most engaged members withdrew or formally left. In Hellige Hallvard it was precisely the core group that disappeared – those who had carried the parish through its first vulnerable years.
It is against this background that the following pages must be read. They are concerned not only with canon law, episcopal appointments or parish decisions. They are concerned with how a small but composite Orthodox milieu in Scandinavia attempted to navigate between pandemic, war, refugee flows and old, unresolved conflicts about authority, belonging and credibility.
The chapter about myself was originally written anonymously and sent to me by email. When I read it, I reflected that I was only one piece in a dramatic chapter of the Orthodox Church’s history in Norway. At the same time I was also a contemporary witness. What is written here is therefore how I myself have seen and assessed these events.
I am one of those who for several decades have moved within this landscape. Towards the end of a long and contested ecclesiastical life, I formulated what a journalist at RISU in the summer of 2026 described as “one of the clearest analyses of how the war in Ukraine also tears open ecclesiastical conflicts in Norway. His opinion piece on the rental of the Gamlebyen cemetery chapel demonstrates an ability to hold two thoughts at once: the recognition of the deep mistrust that many Ukrainians carry with them, and the principled demand that religious freedom must not yield when it becomes politically demanding. It is a text that testifies to the experience and knowledge he has gathered through several decades in the Norwegian Orthodox landscape.”
The account is based on publicly available sources: newspaper investigations, ecclesiastical announcements, parish documents and contemporary reporting. It seeks to be sober, yet it does not omit to describe the ruptures, departures and choices that actually took place.
Not every Orthodox community in Norway stood inside that choice of patriarchs. In Agder a small convent, Maria Bebudelse in Tvedestrand, was registered in 2020–21 under Metropolitan Agafangel of ROCA — a Russian exile synod that had refused communion with Moscow already in 2007. Its abbess, Mother Evgenia (Aino Theisen), a Norwegian pianist turned nun, belongs to the same landscape of belonging and rupture described in these pages; her house is wil be in a later chapter.
