Greek Independence & Church Autocephaly

The war the Greeks began in 1821 against Ottoman rule, which ended in an independent kingdom by 1830. The Church was in it from the first: the nation remembers Metropolitan Germanos of Patras raising the banner of the Cross at Agia Lavra on 25 March, the feast of the Annunciation, and the day is still kept as both, though historians argue over the details. In Constantinople Patriarch Gregory V was hanged from the gate of the Patriarchate that Easter in reprisal. The new state, under a Bavarian regency, declared its Church independent of Constantinople by its own act in 1833, on the model of the Russian Synod, and the rift was healed only when the Ecumenical Patriarchate granted autocephaly by its Tomos of 1850.