1868 – 1946
Metropolitan Evlogy (Georgievsky) was the ROCOR Diocesan Bishop for Western Europe (including the parishes in the UK) from 1921 to 1927.
The future Metropolitan Evlogy was born Basil S. Georgievsky, in Somovo, Voronezh, Russia in 1868. After graduating from parochial school, he entered the seminary in Tula, which he completed in 1889, and continued his studies at the Moscow Theological Academy. In 1895, he was tonsured a monk and ordained to the priesthood. In 1903 he was consecrated to be the Bishop of Lublin. In 1912, Bishop Evlogy was elevated to archbishop, becoming the Administrator of Galician church affairs. From 1914 he was the Archbishop of Volhynia and Zhitomir. In 1917 Archbishop Evlogy participated in the preparatory commission for the Pan-Russian Council (known later as the ‘1917-1918 council’). When, after 1918, he was refused permission to return to his diocese, Archbishop Evlogy went into exile in Yugoslavia.
Until his departure into schism from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1926, Archbishop Evlogy belonged to the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, the centred in Sremski-Karlovtsi, Yugoslavia. It was by this Holy Synod that, with the consent of Patriarch (and future canonised saint) Tikhon, he was given the administration of the parishes of Western Europe. In 1922, he was elevated to become Metropolitan of Paris and Western Europe by Patriarch St Tikhon. After the dissolution of the Supreme Ecclesiastical Administration and the establishment of the Synod of the Russian Orthodox Bishops Abroad in 1922, Metropolitan Evlogy voted on all the decisive resolutions of the Synod, including the administrative restructuring in the emigration.
The Synod’s attempt to limit the influence of Metropolitan Evlogy — by the removal of the German Diocese — precipitated his break from the Synod in 1926, and the splitting apart of a number of the Western European communities (including London) as a result of the schism. From 1927 to 1931 Metropolitan Evlogy was attached to the Moscow Patriarchate; from 1931 to 1945 he was with Patriarchate of Constantinople; and from 1945 until his death in Paris in 1946, he was again with the Moscow Patriarchate.