Ambrosios Pleianthidis

Ambrosios Pleianthidis was a Greek Orthodox hierarch of the Ecumenical Patriarchate who served as Metropolitan of Moschonisia in 1922 and was killed at the close of the Greco-Turkish War. He was born in 1872 in Smyrna (Izmir), then a major Ottoman port with a large Greek Orthodox community. He was educated in his native city, including at the Evangelical School of Smyrna, and later studied at the Theological School of Halki, the principal seminary of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. After ordination he served in clerical and administrative posts and became closely associated with the Metropolis of Smyrna, where he worked as a preacher and as chancellor under Metropolitan Chrysostomos Kalafatis.

In February 1922 the Ecumenical Patriarchate established the Metropolis of Moschonisia, covering the small Aegean archipelago of that name (the Moschonisia or Ayvalık Islands, whose chief island is today Cunda) off the northwestern coast of Asia Minor. Ambrosios was elected to the new see and took up his duties among a predominantly Greek Orthodox island population. His episcopate lasted only about seven months. In September 1922, after the collapse of the Greek army’s position in Anatolia, Turkish nationalist forces occupied the Ayvalık and Moschonisia region. Mass killings and expulsions of the local Greek Orthodox population followed, in the events Greek historiography calls the Asia Minor Catastrophe.

Metropolitan Ambrosios remained with his flock rather than fleeing. He was arrested by Turkish troops and put to death on 15 September 1922. Contemporary reports agree that he was executed as part of the destruction of the Greek Orthodox communities of that coast; later hagiographical accounts give differing details of the manner of his death, which cannot all be independently confirmed. His killing belongs to the same wave of violence that claimed several other bishops of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, most prominently Chrysostomos of Smyrna.

The Eastern Orthodox Church venerates Ambrosios as a hieromartyr. On 4 November 1992 the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece formally glorified him together with Chrysostomos of Smyrna and other bishops and clergy slain in Asia Minor in 1922. Their collective memory is observed on the Sunday before the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross; he is also associated with 15 September, the date given for his death. He held a metropolitan see, not the office of patriarch or pope. In accordance with Eastern Orthodox canonical practice for bishops, he lived as a celibate monastic clergyman and is not recorded as having had a wife or children.