Walling off (apoteichisis): legitimizing Orthodox dissent

Some Orthodox clergy stop naming their bishop in the Liturgy because they judge him to be teaching heresy. Those who justify this by a canon of 861 call it “walling off” (apoteichisis), though not every act of non-commemoration appeals to that idea. In the 20th century the Greek Old Calendarist “resistance” built an ecclesiology on it, while Athonite monks stopped commemorating Patriarch Athenagoras in protest against his rapprochement with Rome. In 2016–17, clergy in Greece, Romania and Moldova acted on it. Today it causes tensions in the Church of Cyprus and draws public warnings from bishops, and the case for it circulates largely online, where its supporters now debate whether a movement without bishops can last. Scholars have barely studied it.

This analysis is an extended version of an explainer published in the Weekly Review of Orthodox Church News on 31 October 2026.
Like most of the content on this website, this analysis was prepared using Claude AI, under the supervision and with the input of the Editor.

The word

Apoteichisis (ἀποτείχισις; also apoteichismos) means “walling off”. In current Orthodox usage it refers to clergy or laity who stop commemorating their bishop in the Divine Liturgy. In doing so they also break communion with him, because they hold that he teaches heresy.

Those who practise it insist that they are leaving error, not the Church. On their account this is not schism; it protects the Church from schism. Their opponents call it disobedience, and in the end schism. In Romanian the people involved are called nepomenitori, and in Russian непоминающие (nepominayushchie). Both mean “non-commemorators”. Romanian supporters translate apoteichisis as îngrădire (“fencing off”), usually îngrădire de erezie, “walling off from heresy”; they also speak of întreruperea pomenirii, “cessation of commemoration”.

The canon uses the verb; as a technical term, the noun is recent. Not everyone who stops commemorating a bishop speaks of walling off. Fr Theodoros Zisis, the best-known advocate of the practice in Greece, notes that the term “is not found in theological dictionaries” and that “its use is relatively recent”. In his book he recommends “cessation of commemoration” instead (though in 2026 he spoke of “walling off” himself; see below), because the image of a wall lets opponents claim that a wall is being raised against the Church. On Mount Athos, he adds, the distinction was traditionally drawn between “non-commemorators” and “commemorators” (Zisis 2017, English translation 2026, § A.6; see below).

The word itself is older than the canon. Metropolitan Nektarios of Hong Kong and South East Asia recalled its first sense in October 2026. In Thucydides, the Athenians “wall off” Potidaea: they build fortifications to cut the city off, not to protect themselves. “They are not fortifying their own home; they are besieging someone else’s.” (Orthodox Metropolitanate of Hong Kong and South East Asia, Facebook, 19 Oct 2026 — English.) The two senses, refuge and siege, sum up the modern argument well.

The canonical source: Canon 15 of the “First-Second” Council (861)

The term comes from a council held in Constantinople in 861 under Patriarch Photios. It is known as the “First-Second” Council (Protodeutera). Three of its canons deal with clergy who break communion with their superior.

Canons 13 and 14 punish presbyters and bishops who stop commemorating their bishop or metropolitan on the strength of charges that no synod has examined.
Canon 15 applies the same rule to metropolitans and patriarchs. It then adds an exception, which is the whole legal basis of the practice. Clergy who separate from a president who publicly preaches “some heresy condemned by the holy Synods or Fathers” are not to be punished, even if they act before any synodal judgment.

The canon describes them as «τῆς πρός τόν καλούμενον Ἐπίσκοπον κοινωνίας ἑαυτούς ἀποτειχίζοντες» (“walling themselves off from communion with the so-called bishop”). They are owed the honour due to the Orthodox, «οὐ γάρ Ἐπισκόπων, ἀλλά ψευδεπισκόπων καί ψευδοδιδασκάλων κατέγνωσαν» (“for they have condemned not bishops but false bishops and false teachers”). The canon adds that they have not split the Church by schism, but have tried to deliver it from schisms and divisions.

The Greek is quoted here as it appears in Fr Theodoros Zisis’s book (below). The standard editions are the Rhalles–Potles Syntagma, vol. 2, and the Pedalion of St Nikodemos the Hagiorite, both named by Apoteichisis.com (English/Greek; a project that favours the practice).

Three points in dispute

Almost every modern argument about walling off turns on how to read the canon. Three questions recur.

“Condemned”. The canon speaks of a heresy κατεγνωσμένην, “condemned”.
- The strict reading: the exception covers only a heresy that a council or the Fathers have already condemned. On this view, breaking communion over a new question, such as the documents of the 2016 Council of Crete, is exactly what Canons 13–14 punish.
- The broad reading: any manifest heresy qualifies, including one that is “newly manifest”. This was argued in the Old Calendarist “resistance” milieu on the basis of the 19th-century commentary of the Serbian canonist Bishop Nikodim Milaš (imoph.org; text first published in Ὀρθόδοξος Ἔνστασις καὶ Μαρτυρία no. 3, Apr–Jun 1986 — English; author not named). Proponents add that “ecumenism” has been condemned in substance, if not by name, by earlier councils’ condemnations of the errors involved.
Permission or duty. Canon 15 says such clergy are not to be punished. It does not say they must separate. Its critics read it as a permission. Many proponents read it as a duty in times of heresy. Hieromonk Euthymios Trikaminas (2014, below) rejects the view that the canon “is not obligatory, but contingent”, and the website of the Esphigmenou zealots states that Canon 15 “OBLIGATES the monks” to cease commemoration. The argument is still going on: in September 2025 a Romanian site translated a text by Dimitrios Hatzinikolaou, a former associate professor at the University of Ioannina, arguing that breaking communion with heretical pastors is obligatory, against the view he attributes to the canonist Archimandrite Epiphanios Theodoropoulos (Rezistența Ortodoxă, 14 Sep 2025 — Romanian). Proponents back this with patristic examples: St Maximus the Confessor; St Theodore the Studite; St Mark of Ephesus after Florence; and the clergy and people of Constantinople who broke with Nestorius before the Council of Ephesus.
Separation from what. Some read the canon as allowing only a break with one heretical bishop. Others extend it to every bishop who stays in communion with him, and so to entire local Churches. This third question separates the “resistance” view from the stricter Old Calendarist view (below).

Old Calendarist “resistance”: walling off as an ecclesiology

For most of its history Canon 15 lived in the commentaries. The calendar dispute gave it a new use.

The Church of Greece adopted the revised (New Julian) calendar in 1924. Those who refused it organised their own hierarchy from 1935, with subsequent developments leading to a number of divisions among the Old Calendarists. On the strict view, set out in synodal texts of May and June 1935, the New Calendar Church had cut itself off from Orthodoxy and was without grace. The historian-apologist Vladimir Moss, who writes from that standpoint, quotes the encyclical of 8/21 June 1935 calling it a “schismatic church … from whom the grace of the All-Holy Spirit has fled” (Moss, The True Orthodox Church of Greece, 1970–2000, 2013, pp. 30–31).

Metropolitan Cyprian and the Synod in Resistance

The figure who made walling off a full ecclesiology was Metropolitan Cyprian of Oropos and Fili.

His break. He had founded the monastery of Sts Cyprian and Justina at Fili within the Church of Greece. He separated from it “in 1969 … because of its increased and unconscionable participation in, and support of, the World Council of Churches and the ecumenical movement in general” (author’s note in Cyprian, The Heresy of Ecumenism and the Patristic Stand of the Orthodox, Etna, 1998).
His positions. He set out his “ecclesiological positions” in 1984. In 1985 he formed a separate synod with Metropolitan Giovanni of Sardinia: the Holy Synod in Resistance (OrthodoxWiki — English).

Cyprian’s core idea was a distinction between two parts of a divided Church.

The “healthy” and the “ailing”. The “Orthodox Church as a whole is unerring and invincible”, but Christians and local Churches can fall ill in faith. Those who follow the calendar innovation are “ailing”, not cut off: they “have not yet been specifically judged in a Pan-Orthodox fashion”, so “their Mysteries are valid”.
The Old Calendarists’ place. The Old Calendarists, he wrote, have “walled themselves off from the innovators” and “actually broken communion ‘before [a] conciliar or synodal verdict,’ as is allowed in the Fifteenth Canon”. The matter awaits a future unifying synod. (Cyprian, 1984, in the English translation of Patrick G. Barker, A Study of the Ecclesiology of Resistance, Etna, 1994, pp. 57–61, as quoted by Moss, pp. 29–30.)

The Informatory Epistle of 2 December 1998 states it compactly. The Old Calendarists “in resistance, who have walled themselves off on account of ecumenism”, are the “healthy part” of the Body of Christ. They have “fullness in Christ” in the Eucharist. Yet they do not constitute “the Church in Her totality nor even the local Church”, because they are “prone to fragmentation and infighting” (Cyprian, An Informatory Epistle Concerning the Ecclesiological Identity of the Orthodox in Resistance to the Panheresy of Ecumenism, Fili, 1998, § II).

Promoting the concept while applying it to itself

The Synod in Resistance was the main channel through which the vocabulary of walling off reached a wider, and especially an English-speaking, readership. Its American exarchate, the Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies (CTOS) at Etna, California, published Cyprian’s writings and studies of them in English. The best example is Barker’s Study of the Ecclesiology of Resistance (1994).

Its position was attacked from two sides.

From the stricter Old Calendarist side. Vladimir Moss calls Cyprian’s view of the innovators as “still unsentenced” “a historical mistake”, because the 1935 Old Calendarist synod had already condemned them (Moss, 2013, ch. 5, “The Ecclesiology of Metropolitan Cyprian”, pp. 29ff.). Hieromonk Maximus (Maretta), speaking in Chicago in 2007, took aim at a related position. He criticised “conservative New Calendarists” who call ecumenism wrong, “but nevertheless remain in churches which follow the New Calendar and foster Ecumenism” (Fr Maximus Maretta, “The Problem of Conservative New Calendarism”, talk at the conference “Orthodoxy and Modern Ecumenism”, University of Chicago, 5/18 March 2007).
From the canonical Churches. A lay author, “Panagiotis M.”, argued on OrthoChristian that the canons require a synodal condemnation, and that it is the Old Calendarists who “have done so prior to any synodal verdict” by setting up parallel hierarchies (Panagiotis M., “A Critique of Old Calendarist Ecclesiology”, OrthoChristian, Jan 2019 — English).

The Synod in Resistance itself took a step that shows the limits of its own model. In March 2014 it united with the Church of the Genuine Orthodox Christians of Greece, which holds the stricter view (GOC announcement, 19 Mar 2014 — English). Cyprian died in 2013. The “resistance” position nevertheless survived in print and online. It remains the most fully argued theory of walling off, and it is now often read by people who have no intention of becoming Old Calendarists.

Mount Athos: from the calendar to Athenagoras, and Esphigmenou

Cyprian’s model was not the only one available. On Mount Athos, non-commemoration was practised within the Patriarchate’s jurisdiction. The detailed chronologies come almost entirely from interested parties, and are attributed below accordingly. Nor do the sources consulted show that the Athonite non-commemorators of those decades spoke of apoteichisis: the word does not appear in the jurists’ history of the Esphigmenou case (below), and Zisis notes that on the Mountain the distinction was between “commemorators” and “non-commemorators”. Later advocates read these episodes in the light of Canon 15.

The calendar, 1924–27. According to the chronology published by the Esphigmenou zealots, the Athonite community (Vatopedi excepted) ceased commemorating the Ecumenical Patriarch after the 1924 calendar change. It resumed in 1927 on the Patriarchate’s assurance that a pan-Orthodox council would settle the calendar question; Esphigmenou, it says, did not accept that compromise (esphigmenou.com, “A Historical Background” — English; site run by “Friends of Esphigmenou”).
Athenagoras, 1965–72. After Patriarch Athenagoras and Pope Paul VI lifted the anathemas of 1054 in December 1965, monasteries and cells stopped commemorating the Patriarch. Fr Theodoros Zisis writes that “most of the Monasteries of Mount Athos, as well as kelliotes monks—among whom was Saint Paisios” ceased commemoration “during the years 1969–1972”. So, he says, did three metropolitans of the “New Lands”: Ambrosios of Eleftheroupolis, Augustinos (Kantiotis) of Florina and Pavlos of Paramythia. “No one punished them then,” he adds (Zisis 2017, English translation 2026, § B.3). St Paisios’s name is claimed by both sides: the Patriarchate-recognised Esphigmenou brotherhood, in whose monastery he was tonsured, says that he opposed zealotry and Old Calendarism (esphigmenou.gr, FAQ — Greek). In 2017 Athonite sources made the same point: monasteries that ceased commemoration under Athenagoras had not been sanctioned (Pravoslavie.ru, 17 Mar 2017 — English).
The Holy Community’s resolution, 1971. On 13 November 1971 the Holy Community resolved that “each Holy Monastery, as a self-governing entity, is to remain free to choose a course of action according to its conscience” on resuming commemoration (wording as given by esphigmenou.com; the date as given by the Union of Orthodox Journalists, 24 Jul 2024 — English). In effect, the Mountain’s own governing body tolerated non-commemoration, at least for a time.
Numbers. Vladimir Moss cites a figure of “about a third of the 1200 monks on the Holy Mountain” as “zealots who refused to commemorate the Ecumenical Patriarch” in the later 1970s. His sources are a 1979 travel book for Greece and an article by Bishop Kallistos (Ware) in Sobornost (1983) (Moss, 2013, p. 9). Those sources have not been checked independently for this analysis.

Esphigmenou

One monastery never resumed commemoration, and its history shows where Athonite non-commemoration could lead.

A legal history. The most detailed account up to 2002 is a history of the case by three Greek jurists: Spyros Troianos (emeritus professor, University of Athens), Charalambos Papastathis (professor, University of Thessaloniki) and Diogenis Karagiannakidis (lawyer). It draws on the minutes of the Holy Community and on the report of a Holy Community commission (text published by 24grammata, 20 Oct 2011 — Greek). It does not use the word apoteichisis: like Zisis, it speaks of not commemorating.
1972: from non-commemoration to a break in communion. The jurists date the decisive change to 1972. Until then Esphigmenou, “like others before it”, had omitted the Patriarch’s name but remained in communion with the other monasteries and took part in governing the Mountain. In 1972 its representative began staying outside the Holy Community’s chamber during the opening prayer, because he would not pray with representatives in communion with the Patriarch. On 6 June 1972 the Holy Community expelled him, stating that the monastery had proclaimed itself “zealot” and accepted as its ecclesiastical head “the self-styled Archbishop Auxentios”, an Old Calendarist hierarch. The monastery replied that the issue was only its “lawful non-commemoration of the name of the Ecumenical Patriarch” and spoke of “persecution for the faith” (§§ 1–2). The distinction drawn here, between not naming the Patriarch and refusing communion with those who do, is the one on which the whole later debate turns.
1972–74, in the monastery’s account. According to its own account, the brotherhood also raised black flags in 1972 in protest against Athenagoras’s contacts with the Pope. After Patriarch Demetrios demanded sanctions against monks refusing to commemorate him (11 March 1974, per the UOJ), the monastery was blockaded, and the brothers hung the banner “Orthodoxy or Death” on its walls.
Its own justification. The zealots’ English website invokes Canon 15, the 1971 resolution and the 1993 and 1999 letters of all twenty Athonite monasteries questioning Patriarch Bartholomew’s statements on Rome. It says the monks will cease commemoration “until an ecumenical synod can be convened to clarify the matter” (esphigmenou.com, “What the dispute is about”). Their 2002 Rejoinder likewise presents the monastery as “faithful to the 1971 resolution” and as awaiting “the condemnation of the pan heresy of Ecumenism”; it names no synod or bishop with which it is in communion.
Outside support, without subordination. The monastery has long received sacramental support from Greek Old Calendarists. Citing the Holy Community commission, the jurists record that the brotherhood’s elected abbot, Methodios, had been ordained by an Old Calendarist archbishop, and that services were celebrated on the antimension of an Old Calendarist bishop (§ 14). The brothers, however, told the commission that they kept “spiritual communion” with that jurisdiction but “not a relationship of subordination” to it. In a letter of 1980 they declared themselves “always faithful to the institution of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, not belonging or subject to another ecclesiastical jurisdiction”; their quarrel, they said, was with the persons of the Patriarch and his Synod (§ 17). The jurists also note that, as of 2002, they knew of no formal decision declaring the monastery schismatic, though Patriarchal documents from 1999 described it as “in schism” (§ 19).
Schism or walling off? The Patriarchate declared the brotherhood schismatic in 2002. Its opponents say it had gone well beyond non-commemoration: a statement of the Holy Community from early 2003 speaks of “full and exclusive ecclesiastical communion with one of the factions of the so-called GOC” (text hosted by OODE — Greek), and the rival, Patriarchate-recognised brotherhood calls the occupants an “extra-ecclesial group” of so-called “genuine Orthodox” (esphigmenou.gr, FAQ — Greek). The zealots’ own websites, as consulted, name no synod or bishop. Their present ties, and who ordains their clergy today, are not documented in the sources consulted.
Two brotherhoods. On 3 October 2005 the Patriarchate’s Synod sanctioned a new Esphigmenou brotherhood. It has never been able to take possession of the monastery, which remains in the hands of the zealots under Archimandrite Methodios. The new brotherhood, under Archimandrite Bartholomew, has its seat in Karyes; its abbot told a Greek newspaper in 2025 that “we are forced to stay in Karyes” (To Pontiki, 29 Jan 2025 — Greek). The Greek Supreme Court on 8 July 2020 rejected the zealots’ appeal against an order to hand over the monastery’s properties to the new brotherhood (OrthoChristian, 9 Jul 2020 — English). In July 2025 the zealots were still protesting against the sealing of their only land access (esphigmenou.com).

The Athonite precedent matters in two ways. It supplied what the Old Calendarists could not: an example of non-commemoration by monks who stayed, in their own eyes and for years in the eyes of the Holy Community, within the Patriarchate. And Esphigmenou supplied the counter-example that every critic now cites. In 2011 a Serbian bishop could dismiss an opponent as raising “the flag of pseudo-Orthodoxy like the zealots of Esphigmenou” (below).

Before Crete: a practice waiting for an occasion

Before 2016 the idea was discussed within the Church of Greece, but rarely acted on.

2009. A “Confession of Faith against Ecumenism” circulated among Greek clergy and monastics; according to Religion News Service, the group behind it was led by three senior hierarchs (RNS, 15 Jul 2009 — English). It set out the doctrinal case later invoked by those who walled off.
2011: a “Declaration and Confession of Walling-Off”. In March 2011 To Vima reported that “‘Civil War’ has broken out in the Church of Greece” between self-described traditionalist hierarchs and those engaged in dialogue. Some of the faithful had signed a “Declaration and Confession of Walling-Off”, warning bishops that “we will abstain from ecclesiastical Sacraments and Acts performed by clergy who commune and mention heretics and heretical bishops”. The paper called it one of several “neoconservative movements” voicing their positions “on the Internet”. Metropolitans Seraphim of Piraeus and Seraphim of Kythera were named as having “boosted the rebellion” (Maria Antoniadou, To Vima, 15 Mar 2011, in J. Sanidopoulos’s translation — English). Sanidopoulos linked the report to a quarrel with a Serbian dimension. Seraphim of Kythera’s Sunday of Orthodoxy message had defended the deposed Bishop Artemije of Raška and Prizren as a confessor against ecumenism. The former Bishop Atanasije (Jevtić) of Herzegovina replied through Romfea that Artemije “raises the flag of pseudo-Orthodoxy like the zealots of Esphigmenou” (J. Sanidopoulos, 14 Mar 2011 — English).
2014: walling off as an obligation. On 17 January 2014 Hieromonk Euthymios Trikaminas, a non-commemorator from the Church of Greece who writes of what “the old elders” of Mount Athos taught him, published “The Defilement of the Mysteries and the Obligation of Walling Off” (Greek original, Pateriki Paradosi). He rejects the arguments that Canon 15 is “not obligatory, but contingent” and that a heresy must first be condemned by name: ecumenism, he argues, is “a comprehensive term of many heresies” (recognition of Mysteries, WCC membership, joint prayer, the branch theory, primacy), each already condemned. His central claim is sacramental. Citing St Theodore the Studite, that “the Communion is defiled solely by the commemoration of him, even if the commemorator may be Orthodox”, he holds that the faithful should not receive Communion at a Liturgy where a heretical bishop is named. The text was translated into English in 2024 for Orthodox Traditionalist, a site that invites its readers to “Join the GOC” (the Genuine Orthodox Christians); its translator notes that the author “is not a member” of that Church (Orthodox Traditionalist, 5 Feb 2024 — English).

If, as Trikaminas argues, the Mysteries are defiled by the commemoration, the line between non-commemorators in the canonical Church and the Old Calendarists becomes thin. What was still lacking was a pan-Orthodox act that could be presented as an official endorsement of ecumenism, rather than the personal views of individual hierarchs. The Council of Crete supplied it.

The 2016–17 wave

The Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church met in Crete “during the week of Pentecost (18–26 June 2016)” (the Council’s Message — English). The Churches of Antioch, Bulgaria, Georgia and Russia did not attend. Its critics objected above all to the document on relations with “the rest of the Christian world”, which in their view gave ecclesial standing to the heterodox.

Greece

Thessaloniki. On the Sunday of Orthodoxy, 5 March 2017, the patristics professor Fr Theodoros Zisis announced from the ambo that he would no longer commemorate Metropolitan Anthimos of Thessaloniki. Fr Nikolaos Manolis had done the same a few weeks earlier. Anthimos barred Zisis from serving within days (OrthoChristian, 15 Mar 2017; J. Sanidopoulos, 15–16 Mar 2017 — English). Zisis’s standing as a senior academic gave the movement a public face.
Zisis’s book. He set out his case in Δέν εἶναι σχίσμα ἡ Ἀποτείχιση: Ὀφειλόμενες ἐξηγήσεις (“Walling off is not schism: explanations owed”), Thessaloniki: To Palimpsiston, series Kairos no. 24, prologue dated September 2017 (text online — Greek; ISBN not found). An English translation appeared online in February 2026 (Orthodox Miscellany, 17 Feb 2026). Three points stand out.
- On “condemned”: it is “not necessary for the heresy-promoting bishop to have been condemned by a Council”; ecumenism is itself “a condemned heresy” because its “basic doctrines have been condemned by ancient Saints and ancient synods”, and by modern saints such as Justin Popovich and Paisios.
- On Crete: the Council turned ecumenism from the personal opinion of individual hierarchs into something “synodically ratified”. In his view earlier non-commemoration of Patriarch Bartholomew might have prevented it.
- On the Mysteries: a whole part of the book is headed “We will not cause a schism (And without the commemoration of the bishop, the Mysteries remain valid)”.
- On schism: the non-commemorators act “without creating a schism, without submitting to another ecclesiastical administration, uncanonical, and without commemorating other bishops in the services”. That sentence marks the line between his position and the Old Calendarists’.
He has also insisted, in an interview: “We are not calling for a schism” (OrthoChristian — English).
Crete. Four priests on the island stopped commemorating their bishops. On 16 March 2017 the Provincial Synod of Crete called their conduct “erroneous” (Pravoslavie.ru, 17 Mar 2017).
Mount Athos. By the end of March 2017, more than fifty Athonite cells and kalyves had reportedly stopped commemorating the Ecumenical Patriarch (OrthoChristian, 31 Mar 2017 — English, citing Vima Orthodoxias).

Beyond the Greek-speaking world

The wave was not only Greek, and outside Greece it began before Crete. In each case the local trigger differed; the canonical vocabulary was usually, but not always, the same, and Greek figures travelled to lend support.

Romania. After Crete, groups of clergy and monks stopped commemorating their bishops, above all in the Archdiocese of Iași. Their vocabulary is explicitly that of walling off. Three priests deposed in early 2017 had written, in a letter of 16 November 2016, that “the purpose of ceasing to commemorate the hierarch is the necessary walling off from heresy” (îngrădirea necesară de erezie) (Adevărul, 28 Feb 2017 — Romanian). A canonist of the Iași faculty, Emilian-Iustinian Roman, examined the case in the light of Canons 13–15. He concluded that refusing to commemorate the hierarch is canonical disobedience that may amount to schism (Roman 2017, below).
- Today. No figures are available, but the movement’s own writers describe it as still active and divided. In 2024 a non-commemorating hieromonk counted at least ten non-commemorating priests in the Archdiocese of Iași who had not been deposed, and two who had, and argued against making non-commemoration “the only solution” (Hieromonk Lavrentie Carp, 13 Feb 2024 — Romanian). One of the priests deposed in 2017 has accused other non-commemorators of compromise (Ciprian Staicu, 15 Feb 2023 — Romanian). Ten years after Crete, a sympathetic priest lamented “fragmentation into ever smaller groups” and wrote that walling off had become “a lonely path” for many (Ortodoxia mărturisitoare, 5 May 2026 — Romanian).
Moldova. Here the movement began over Havana, and it cited Canon 15 by name. From 14 February 2016, two days after the meeting between Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, two monasteries and twelve priests of the Metropolis of Chișinău stopped commemorating Patriarch Kirill, stating: “we apply the 2nd part of Canon 15 of the Council of Constantinople called the First-Second (861)”. In April eight abbots and abbesses called on Bishop Petru of Ungheni to condemn “the heresy of ecumenism” in the pre-conciliar documents (Russkaya Liniya, 4 Apr 2016 — Russian). On 28 February the Moldovan Synod had appealed to them not to “take the path of schism”, without announcing sanctions (Pravoslavie.ru, 29 Feb 2016 — Russian). In July 2016, at a gathering to which Fr Theodoros Zisis and Professor Demetrios Tselengidis had been invited, “more than 70 clergy and 5 monasteries” were reported to be continuing to refuse commemoration “of the bishops of the Moldavian Church and the Patriarch of Moscow”, now also over Crete; they petitioned Patriarch Kirill to “reject the Council of Crete” (Orthodox Ethos, 14 Jul 2016 — English; a site that favours the movement, and the only source for that figure). Bishop Petru and Bishop Longin (below) signed the petition. Whether the Moldovan group persisted is not documented in the sources consulted: later coverage of the Moldovan Church is dominated by the rivalry between the Moscow-linked and Romanian-linked metropolises, a different dispute.
Ukraine. Before Crete, the trigger was Havana. On 10 March 2016 Bishop Longin (Zhar), a vicar bishop of the Chernivtsi diocese of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), told clergy at the Bancheny monastery: “I do not commemorate Patriarch Kirill at the divine liturgy primarily because of the 5th point” of the joint declaration signed by Pope Francis and Kirill on 12 February 2016. He called the declaration “a betrayal and violation of the Orthodox faith” (RISU, 29 Mar 2016, as republished by Russia Religion News, 30 Mar 2016 — English). He co-signed the Moldovan text that July. The context matters. On 28 December 2015, at the assembly of the Kyiv eparchy, Metropolitan Onufry, the primate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, was reported as saying that “if somewhere today the question is acute, one may refrain from commemorating the patriarch”, by way of exception and by economy, citing Romanian practice in which priests name only their bishop (vlasti.net, 30 Dec 2015, relaying Religiya v Ukraini — Russian). The remark was widely reported at the time, but all the reports found go back to that one account; no official text of the address was found. A Serbian anti-ecumenist site commented that Longin was thus not breaking new ground, that his motives were also political, and that he still commemorated Onufry, who commemorated Kirill (Borba za veru, 30 Mar 2016 — Serbian). The reports consulted record no appeal to Canon 15. Longin’s protest was doctrinal in its stated reasons, but it took place within a pastoral allowance granted by his own primate and without a break in communion, so it is not walling off in the technical sense. In April 2017 Nezavisimaya Gazeta quoted a political analyst as saying that Longin had resumed commemorating Kirill once the Russian Church stayed away from Crete (NG, 19 Apr 2017 — Russian). In June 2022, by then a metropolitan, he publicly told Kirill that he would “answer to God” for blessing the war (RISU, 6 Jun 2022 — English).
Serbia: a parallel outside the canon’s vocabulary. Bishop Artemije of Raška and Prizren, a prominent opponent of ecumenism, was removed from his see in 2010 and later deposed by the Serbian Church; with monks who left Kosovo with him, he formed what is now the “Eparchy of Raška-Prizren in Exile” (below). It describes itself as having “temporarily withdrawn from communion” with the Belgrade hierarchy over the faith. That is a structured break over ecumenism, but in the texts consulted it is not argued from Canon 15.

Non-commemorators: Slavic usage and a distinction

In the Russian-language tradition the theme has a history of its own. After Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky) issued his declaration of loyalty to the Soviet state in 1927, a large part of the clergy and episcopate refused to commemorate him. These were the original непоминающие. Their reason was not heresy in the sense of Canon 15, but what they saw as a betrayal of the Church’s freedom. That precedent still shapes Russian Orthodox, and especially Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), debates about when non-commemoration is legitimate.

It should be kept apart from a third phenomenon: cessation of commemoration for political reasons, as when some clergy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church stopped commemorating Patriarch Kirill after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. (Today, the situation is no longer the same, as the UOC has declared its independence.) These cases share the liturgical act but not the canonical claim. Those involved generally did not invoke Canon 15 or accuse Kirill of preaching a condemned heresy. Treating them as “walling off” in the technical sense would blur what is at stake.

How the idea now travels: the internet

The wave of 2016–17 was documented, argued over and amplified online: on blogs, news aggregators of the anti-ecumenist current, and Facebook pages. That pattern has intensified.

A book written for the web. The clearest recent example is a book-length treatise, Apoteichisis: Heavenly Communion, published on apoteichisis.com (copyright 2026). Its authors describe themselves as anonymous “laymen of the Orthodox Church” who “hold no episcopal office”. They state that the book “pronounces no deposition, no anathema”, “names no living person”, and “does not teach rebellion against the Church”. It follows the Pedalion for the canons and works through Canon 15, the commemoration of names in the Liturgy, the Fathers “who resisted”, and “walling off without becoming schismatic”. The site offers the complete text in English, while it notes that the Greek translation is still incomplete. An argument that grew out of Greek canon law and Greek church politics now reaches its readers first in English.
Translations. Older Greek texts reach English readers mainly through blog translations, often years later: Trikaminas’s 2014 essay in 2024, Zisis’s 2017 book in February 2026. The translators are not neutral. The Trikaminas text was published by an Old Calendarist site, which thus circulates the arguments of non-commemorators who remain, formally, in the canonical Church.
Into Romanian. A Romanian-language site, Rezistența Ortodoxă, active since 2025, translates Greek polemics on walling off, mostly from an Old Calendarist standpoint, under the tags îngrădire and nepomenitori. Its operators are not named. A Greek exchange of July 2026 (below) appeared there in September, by way of an English blog: Greek, then English, then Romanian, within about eleven weeks.
An early observation. Already in 2011 To Vima described the walling-off declaration of that year as part of movements voicing their positions “in the most resounding way … on the Internet”.
AI-generated material. Some online “analyses” of walling off now appear to be machine-generated. They should be treated as leads at most, never as evidence of what any person or body has said. One such text was set aside in preparing this analysis.

The internet changes the practice in two ways. A cleric anywhere can now find a ready-made canonical case, translated and footnoted, without belonging to any Old Calendarist body or Athonite circle. And a call to wall off can reach a parish over the heads of its bishop.

A movement without bishops? The 2026 debate

Non-commemoration without joining another jurisdiction, the position defended by Zisis, raises a practical problem: clergy who name no bishop cannot have new priests ordained. In 2026 this became an open argument among supporters of walling off, conducted on blogs and Facebook and translated within weeks.

The trigger. On 11 July 2026 a YouTube channel called “Ιερά Αποτείχιση” (“Holy Walling Off”) posted a four-minute clip of Fr Theodoros Zisis, titled «Θα αντιδρούμε και θα αγωνιζόμαστε μέσα από την Εκκλησία» (“We will react and struggle from within the Church”) (YouTube — Greek; his son, the monk Serafim, also speaks, according to a critic). On the evidence of the clip’s automatic transcript, Zisis gives three reasons for staying where he is.
- No registration. The Old Calendarists, he notes, registered with the Greek state as a separate religious community, which lets them have their own chapels. The non-commemorators will never do so, because that would mean leaving the Church: “we struggle within the Church, even if they say we are outside it”.
- A precedent. The Athonite non-commemorators of the past and St Paisios did not commemorate the bishop, yet were not outside the Church.
- No bishops of their own. “From the beginning of the walling off we said that we would not make the mistake” of the Old Calendarists of having their own bishops, “unless Orthodox bishops are found” who take up walling off themselves; “then the matter would change”. As presbyters, they will not create bishops “so that they call us a schism”, but will “protest, resist, react and struggle” for the Church to return to Orthodoxy.
The clip was then excerpted in a short article, translated into Romanian under the hostile title “They themselves admit that they have walled themselves off falsely”. It was this that drew the replies below. (Quotations are from YouTube’s automatic Greek transcript and may contain transcription errors.)
“The only way.” Protopresbyter Dimitrios Athanasiou, himself a non-commemorating priest in Greece, replied on 14 July. He called it a “flagrant contradiction” to refuse to create bishops while hoping that bishops will join. He argued that a movement without bishops will fade as its clergy die. He also cited Canon 15. The “only way”, in his view, was to join the synod of the late Bishop Artemije, now the Eparchy of Raška-Prizren “in Exile” (Romanian translation, Rezistența Ortodoxă, 29 Sep 2026, from the English on Orthodox Miscellany).
The Old Calendarist answer. Ioannis N. Paparrigas replied in defence of the Genuine Orthodox Christians (Old Calendarists). If non-commemorators need bishops, he wrote, the same logic points to the existing Old Calendarist synod in Greece, not to a Serbian one (Rezistența Ortodoxă, 30 Sep 2026 — Romanian). In a second text he rebutted Zisis and his son Serafim on the history of the Old Calendarists.
The Eparchy in Exile. The body Athanasiou pointed to is a functioning hierarchy. Bishop Artemije died in 2020. His successor, Bishop Ksenofont, signs synodal texts with three chorbishops, and the Eparchy’s site reports their services in Serbia and a “catacomb” church in Frankfurt (eparhija-prizren.org — Serbian). In a 2026 interview Ksenofont gave his own figures: “more than 40 catacombs”, about 150 monks and nuns, 15 married priests and “thousands of faithful”. He set as conditions for ending the division the condemnation of ecumenism, withdrawal from the World Council of Churches and the annulment of the decisions against Artemije. He also called the Council of Crete a “robber” council (Greek translation of the interview with Sloboda, Sep 2026; English summary by D. Athanasiou, 25 Apr 2026). The figures are the Eparchy’s own.
A Greek audience. The Eparchy’s 2026 Paschal encyclical appeared in Greek on apotixisi.blogspot.com, a blog whose address is the Greek word for “walling off” and which calls itself “the only anti-ecumenist and anti-heretical blog in Greece” (13 Apr 2026). Athanasiou’s name appears beneath the Greek text, with no role stated. No source consulted shows Greek, Romanian or Moldovan clergy formally joining the Eparchy. What can be shown is promotion and translation.

The debate closes a circle. In 2011 Bishop Atanasije (Jevtić) dismissed Artemije as raising “the flag of pseudo-Orthodoxy like the zealots of Esphigmenou”. Fifteen years later, Artemije’s successors are offered to Greek non-commemorators as the bishops their movement lacks. The choice they face is the one that ran through the Esphigmenou case: remain non-commemorators within the esttablished , or accept another hierarchy.

Cyprus, 2025–26: the first ruling hierarch

The Cypriot case goes further than the Greek one, because it reached a ruling metropolitan.

Deposition and suspension. The Holy Synod deposed Metropolitan Tychikos of Paphos on 22 May 2025, and suspended him on 8 January 2026 by 11 votes to 5. According to Phileleftheros, the main charge was walling off, or association with those who practise it.
Terms for his return. The Synod has made a written confession of faith the condition of his return. It must accept “the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church (Crete 2016)” by name, and renounce «τόν ἀποτειχισμόν καί τούς ἀποτειχιστάς» (“walling off and those who practise it”). He has twice offered versions that leave out the Crete clause (philenews, 27 Oct 2026 and 28 Oct 2026 — Greek).
A letter to the clergy. In late October 2026 the Synod confirmed the existence of a letter urging priests to leave the Church of Cyprus (Cyprus Mail, 27 Oct 2026 — English).

In Cyprus, then, acceptance of Crete has itself become a test of communion. That is the mirror image of the position of the four Churches that stayed away from the Council, and it shows how far the dispute has moved since 2016.

A bishop’s warning: Metropolitan Nektarios (October 2026)

On 19 October 2026 Metropolitan Nektarios of Hong Kong and South East Asia, of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, published a reflection titled “Walling Off (Apoteichisis) Means Laying Siege” (Facebook — English). He did not say what prompted it. It names no person or place, and its context is not known.

The text does not deny the canon.

What the canon allows. He calls Canon 15 “a genuine canonical provision”, but limits it to a president who “publicly preaches a heresy already condemned by Councils or Fathers”. That is “one thing”, he writes; “an unrestricted right for every cleric to declare his bishop a heretic simply because he disagrees with him” is “quite another”. It is “not enough to invoke the Canon; we must substantiate why it applies”.
What walling off becomes in practice. His main concern is pastoral. A cleric who “gathers an exclusive circle of the supposedly ‘genuine’ faithful” is “attempting to draw others away”; his wall “is built from derogatory labels, fearmongering, and suspicion”. In such cases, he concludes, “those who describe themselves as ‘walled off’ are not the victims but the aggressors”.

That a hierarch in South East Asia should write on the subject, in English, without naming a local occasion, is itself telling. The question is no longer confined to Greece, Cyprus or the Holy Mountain. Through the same online channels that carry the case for walling off, it reaches dioceses far from where the dispute began.

What is at issue

Stripped to its core, the argument concerns four questions that the canons alone do not settle.

Who decides that a bishop teaches heresy? Canon 15 lets clergy act before a synod rules. It does not say how anyone can know, before a ruling, that the heresy is real and “condemned”.
Is ecumenism a heresy in the canon’s sense? Proponents say it is the “panheresy” of the age. Critics answer that taking part in dialogue, or signing documents others read as ambiguous, is not the public preaching of a doctrine condemned by councils.
What happens after the break? The Synod in Resistance kept Cyprian’s distinction: the “ailing” retain valid Mysteries pending a council. Stricter Old Calendarists denied that. Zisis insists that non-commemorators submit to no other administration and commemorate no other bishop. In 2026 some supporters of walling off began to argue that the position cannot last without bishops, and pointed to the Serbian Eparchy in Exile or to the Old Calendarists. Each answer leads to a different relation with the rest of the Church.
Can a “pan-Orthodox” council (with four Churches absent) be the cause? Earlier cases targeted individual hierarchs. After 2016, the object of protest became a council’s documents. In Cyprus, acceptance of the same council is being required as proof of orthodoxy.

The research record

The practice has generated far more polemic than scholarship. Searches of the main bibliographic databases found no monograph or peer-reviewed study devoted to walling off as such. The nearest works are these:

The Iași dispute. Emilian-Iustinian Roman, “Debating the Documents of the Holy and Great Synod of Crete – A Canonical and Disciplinary Approach. Case Study: The Archbishopric of Iaşi”, Studia UBB Theologia Orthodoxa 62, no. 1 (2017): 159–170, DOI 10.24193/subbto.2017.1.10. A canonist’s treatment of the Romanian non-commemorators, written from within the Church’s disciplinary framework.
Anti-ecumenism generally. Brandon Gallaher, “Ecumenism as civilisational dialogue: Eastern Orthodox anti-ecumenism and Eastern Orthodox ecumenism. A creative or sterile antinomy?”, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 19, no. 4 (2019): 265–285, DOI 10.1080/1474225X.2019.1595827. It treats the wider current from which walling off draws.

Almost everything else is advocacy: the “resistance” literature, Old Calendarist histories, Zisis’s book, Trikaminas, the Esphigmenou websites and the online treatises for the practice; canonists, diocesan statements and hierarchs’ warnings against it. A history that sets the canon, its commentators, the Old Calendarist and Athonite precedents, and the post-2016 movements side by side, across Greek, Romanian and Slavic sources, has yet to be written.

Walling off (apoteichisis): how a ninth-century canon legitimizes Orthodox dissent