Evgenios Karavias

Evgenios Karavias was a Greek Orthodox hierarch of the Ecumenical Patriarchate who held the office of Metropolitan of Anchialos in the early nineteenth century. The Metropolis of Anchialos, seated in the coastal town of Anchialos (ancient Anchialus; today Pomorie on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast), belonged to the Thracian ecclesiastical world of the Patriarchate and served a largely Greek-speaking Orthodox population living under Ottoman rule. Like other metropolitans of that era, the holder of the see combined pastoral care with the communal and civil responsibilities that the Ottoman millet system assigned to Orthodox bishops, who were treated by the state as leaders of their flock and as answerable for its loyalty.

In February and March 1821 the Filiki Eteria launched uprisings in the Danubian Principalities and then in the Peloponnese, opening the Greek War of Independence. The Ottoman government regarded the revolt as a rebellion of the Orthodox millet and held the higher clergy, headed by the Ecumenical Patriarch, collectively responsible. On 10 April 1821 (Julian calendar), Easter Sunday, Patriarch Gregory V was deposed after the liturgy, taken from the cathedral, and hanged at the central gate of the Patriarchate in the Phanar district of Constantinople. His body was left exposed and later thrown into the water of the Golden Horn.

In the same wave of reprisals a number of other metropolitans who were then in the capital were arrested and put to death. Evgenios Karavias, Metropolitan of Anchialos, was among those executed in Constantinople in April 1821. Historical accounts of the events place him with other senior hierarchs present in the city, including the metropolitans of Ephesus and Nicomedia, as victims of the official punishments that followed the outbreak of the revolution. The killings were intended as both retribution and a warning to the remaining Orthodox leadership and population of the empire.

The Orthodox Church later numbered Evgenios Karavias among the hieromartyrs of 1821, associating his memory with that of Patriarch Gregory V and the other bishops who died in Constantinople at the start of the Greek struggle for independence. Precise details of his family origin, education, monastic formation, date of birth, and the earlier course of his episcopal career are not firmly established in standard historical and hagiographical sources. He is known to later generations chiefly through his office as metropolitan of Anchialos and through the circumstances of his death among the martyred hierarchy of 1821.