Field Deck — companion to Dossier IX · Oriental Orthodox
The Thrones & The Wound
Forty-four who hold power in the oldest churches on earth
☩ How to read the deck
Six pre-Chalcedonian churches — Coptic, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Armenian, Syriac and Malankara — separated from
the rest of Christendom in 451, six hundred years before Rome and Constantinople parted. This deck holds only
the living, and only those holding real power right now, in 2026. No saints, no martyrs, no founders —
history belongs in the dossier; the deck is a snapshot of who actually decides.
It runs to 44 rather than 52, and that shortfall is itself the finding: these are ancient churches but mostly
small ones, several of them under active persecution, and their rosters of the living do not stretch to a full deck
without inventing names. Rank is the weight of the office, not the worth of the person (Ace high → 2).
♠ Spades — The Thrones. The reigning heads. Ten thrones for six churches.
♦ Diamonds — The Fault Lines. Where the sword meets the church this year.
♥ Hearts — The Shepherds. The diaspora: where most of these people now live.
♣ Clubs — The Voices. The living scholars who keep the memory and the languages.
✓ All 49 verified online as living and in office — 44 on 2026-07-25, five more on 2026-07-26.The deck is now complete at forty-nine, not fifty-two, and that is deliberate: ♦ ♥ ♣ are full at thirteen,
and ♠ is capped at ten because there are ten thrones across the six churches and no eleventh. Padding it would
mean inventing bishops. The check caught six names a
from-memory deck would have shipped wrong: Eritrea has a new patriarch (Basilos, enthroned Jan 2025);
India's Jacobite catholicos died Oct 2024 (→ Joseph I); the dean of the Coptic synod, Metropolitan
Pachomius, died Mar 2025; Bishop Suriel is no longer of Melbourne; two Armenian archbishops are now
prisoners of their own government; and the Syriac scholar Thomas Koonammakkal died 3 May 2026, eleven
weeks before this build. Re-verify every name at every audit.
♠The Thronesthe reigning heads · ten thrones, six churches · 10 cards
Why ten thrones for six churches: the Armenian Church has four hierarchical sees at once —
Etchmiadzin, Cilicia, Jerusalem and Constantinople — and India has two rival catholicoi claiming the same
throne of St Thomas, one autocephalous and one under Antioch. Neither is a schism in the ordinary sense; both are
live jurisdictional facts you must know before you speak to anyone in these churches.
Successor of St Mark and head of the largest Christian body in the Middle East. Underwent kidney surgery in Austria in January 2026 and recovered; by April–May he was back on the road, touring Turkey, Austria, Italy and Croatia in a single 18-day pastoral swing. Verified 07-25 ⚠︎ Re-checked 2026-10-08: Kidney surgery in Austria (Jan 2026, returned to Cairo ~2026-01-24) and the Turkey/Austria/Italy/Croatia tour confirmed, but MECC (2026-05-14) calls it "a 19-day Pastoral tour", not 18 days. Still Pope; no report of change in office found. UNSOURCED: head of the largest Christian body in the Middle East.
Sixth patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church — the giant of the family , tens of millions strong and by far the largest Oriental Orthodox body. Born 1941; holds a synod of some sixty archbishops together through a decade of war and ethnic fracture.
Catholicos of All Armenians · Etchmiadzin · since 1999
The senior Armenian throne — and the most besieged churchman in this deck . Prosecutors in Yerevan have opened a criminal case against him and imposed a travel ban; the prime minister openly campaigns for his removal. He denies the charges and has not stepped down. Verified 07-25 ⚠︎ Re-checked 2026-10-08: Still Catholicos and still charged, but a Yerevan court lifted his travel ban on 2026-04-10 (PanARMENIAN 2026-04-11), and the case has gone to trial with six bishops: first hearing 2026-08-07, judges recused, Cassation Court sent it to Armavir; hearings set for 2026-09-18 (Armenpress). Note: Caucasian Knot 2026-09-05 still says he is barred from leaving, so travel status is disputed. Diocese news 2026-09-21 carries his Independence Day message as Catholicos. UNSOURCED: prime minister openly campaigns for his removal (not in this src).
Syriac Patriarch of Antioch & All the East · since 2014
Born Sa'id Karim in Qamishli in 1965; a Syrian-American who leads a church scattered by the Syrian war from its own heartland. Toured the Jazira and Euphrates archdioceses in May 2026 and was received by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in June.
Catholicos of Cilicia · Antelias, Lebanon · since 1995
The second Armenian catholicosate, seated in Lebanon and independent of Etchmiadzin. The family's leading ecumenist: he spent 17–21 May 2026 at the Vatican , received by Pope Leo XIV, who thanked him by name for the Catholic–Oriental Orthodox dialogue. Verified 07-25
The freshest throne in the deck, and the first catch of this build. Elected 10 December 2024 and enthroned 26 January 2025 as the sixth Eritrean patriarch. Born 1954; a bishop since 2005. He leads the most politically constrained church of the six. ★ Catch · new since 2025
Head of the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church of India and 92nd on the apostolic throne of St Thomas — a line these Christians trace to the first century, older than any church in northern Europe. Born 1949; enthroned at Parumala in October 2021.
Head of the Indian faction that stayed under Antioch. Raised to the throne after Baselios Thomas I died 31 October 2024 at 95 , and anointed by Patriarch Aphrem II himself — the second catch of this build, and a name a from-memory deck would have got wrong. ★ Catch · new since 2024
85th Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople · since 2019
Born in Istanbul in 1962; shepherd of the remnant Armenian community in Turkey. Has used his throne to plead for restraint in Armenia's church crisis — and in February 2026 told an episcopal assembly that the Supreme Spiritual Council has lost its credibility .
5♠Photo: иеромонах Гевонд Оганесян · Public domain · credit
Nourhan Manougian
Armenian Patriarch of Jerusalem · since 2013
Guardian of the Armenian Quarter and of Armenian rights in the Holy Sepulchre. Led the Bethlehem Christmas liturgy in January 2026 and the Genocide remembrance at St James in April — though Jordan and the Palestinian Authority withdrew recognition of him in 2023 over a disputed land deal.
♦The Fault Lineswhere the sword meets the church · this year, not this century · 13 cards
Read this suit beside the dossier's ⚔ Sword & State section. Two live crises define Oriental
Orthodox power in 2026: a government trying to depose a catholicos in Armenia, with archbishops in prison; and
an ethnic-language schism in Ethiopia that briefly produced a rival synod and cost lives. Both are the same
old story — a church fused to a nation, and no authority above the community it cannot revise. Dossier XII logged
that pattern in Buddhism and called it a mirror. It is a mirror here too.
The archbishop who led the 2024 street movement against land concessions to Azerbaijan. Detained 25 June 2025 on terrorism and coup charges; on 4 June 2026, after roughly 344 days in a cell, the appeals court moved him to house arrest . The charges still stand. Verified 07-25
Arrested June 2025 and convicted on 24 September 2025 of calling for the government's overthrow — two years' imprisonment for a sermon . In June 2026 the Criminal Court of Appeal threw out the verdict and ordered a retrial. His counsel calls the case political. Verified 07-25 ⚠︎ Re-checked 2026-10-08: Overturn and retrial (2026-06-25, sent to Shirak court; house arrest lifted, must stay in Armenia) confirmed. But the conviction date is wrong: sources give 2025-09-25 or a verdict published 2025-10-03 (AP), not 24 September. UNSOURCED: convicted 24 September 2025 (sources: 25 Sep / 3 Oct).
Not a churchman — the man on the other side of the sword , and no deck of Armenian power is honest without him. His Civil Contract party took 49.81% on 7 June 2026 , and his platform openly called for removing the Catholicos and restructuring the Church under state oversight. Verified 07-25 ⚠︎ Re-checked 2026-10-08: 49.81% was the preliminary count; Central Electoral Commission certified the final result on 2026-06-14 at 49.7% for Civil Contract (64 of 105 seats per House of Commons Library). Re-appointment as PM not separately sourced. UNSOURCED: platform called for removing the Catholicos and restructuring the Church under state oversight.
Brother of Karekin II and head of the Armenian Diocese of New Nakhichevan and Russia — which makes him the hinge of the gravest charge in the crisis: the prime minister's claim that the Catholicos and his brother maintain ties to foreign intelligence. The Church denies it.
In January 2023 he and two fellow archbishops consecrated 25 bishops for Oromia and the south without the synod's leave , demanding services in Afaan Oromo and an end to Amhara dominance of the hierarchy. Excommunicated within days; reinstated weeks later under a settlement. Some thirty people died in the violence.
One of the three archbishops who formed the breakaway synod, was excommunicated by the Holy Synod, and was restored to his former seat under the February 2023 agreement. The grievance he named — a church that will not preach in the people's language — has not gone away.
Third of the archbishops behind the Oromia synod. His case shows how the settlement worked: the 25 irregular bishops renounced their titles, the three leaders returned to their old posts, and those who qualified were offered lawful re-ordination.
Named General Secretary in May 2025 , replacing Abune Abraham — the administrative centre of a synod of sixty-plus archbishops across fifty-four dioceses. In a church this size, the secretary's office is where the schism is either managed or lost.
Re-checked 2026-10-11 · not confirmed
Re-checked 2026-10-11: still no source names Abune Dioscorus (Dioskoros) as General Secretary of the Holy Synod, or a May 2025 replacement of Abune Abraham. Addis Standard reports earlier secretaries (Abune Yoseph 2021; Abune Petros later). Keep the office unsourced.
6♦AH
Abune Hiriakos
Ethiopian · Archbishop of Addis Ababa
Appointed to the capital's diocese in the 2025 reshuffle — the most politically exposed seat in Ethiopian Orthodoxy, where the church's relationship with the federal government is negotiated in practice rather than in principle.
Re-checked 2026-10-11 · not confirmed
Re-checked 2026-10-11: no source names Abune Hiriakos as Archbishop of Addis Ababa; 2023 reporting names Abune Henok there. Keep unsourced.
5♦AE
Abune Enbaqom
Ethiopian · head of the monasteries
Given charge of Ethiopia's monasteries in 2025. Worth a card because of what these houses are: the descendants of the desert monasticism the Copts invented, and the keepers of a canon of 81 books that still includes Enoch and Jubilees.
Malankara Orthodox · Thiruvananthapuram · since 2005
Born 1948; twenty years in one of the senior Indian sees. He governs inside the longest-running fault line in this suit — the century-old contest between the autocephalous Malankara Orthodox and the Antioch-aligned Jacobites over who owns which parish. ⚠︎ Re-checked 2026-10-08: Wikipedia's episcopal synod table now lists Gabriel Mar Gregorios as Retired, citing a 2025 circular ("H.G. Dr. Gabriel Mar Gregorios Metropolitan: Kalpana to all Parish"), and lists Catholicos Baselios Marthoma Mathews III over Trivandrum. Retired in 2025; exact date not found. Born 1948-02-10.
One of the cohort of metropolitans consecrated in 2022 to renew the Indian hierarchy under the new catholicos — the generational turnover of a church that has to hold its parishes in court as well as in prayer.
Consecrated in the same 2022 class, with charge of the Madras diocese — the Malankara church beyond its Kerala heartland, among the Indian diaspora of India itself.
♥The Shepherdsthe diaspora · where most of these people now live · 13 cards
Read this suit as a map of exile. Genocide, war and emigration have moved a very large share of
Armenian, Syriac and Coptic Christianity out of its homelands. For many of these churches the diaspora bishop is now
the one who actually pastors, funds and speaks — and the one your own neighbours are most likely to meet.
A♥MS
Metropolitan Serapion
Coptic · Los Angeles & Hawaii · since 1995
First hierarch of the Coptic Diocese of Los Angeles, Southern California and Hawaii, installed 23 December 1995 — three decades building what has become one of the strongest Coptic presences outside Egypt. Verified 07-25
Enthroned 18 November 2017 as the first Coptic Orthodox Bishop of London and Pope Tawadros's official representative to the United Kingdom. The most audible Oriental Orthodox voice in English-speaking public life on persecution and religious freedom.
The freshest mandate in the deck. Born in Yerevan in 1981; first elected primate in 2022 and re-elected to a second four-year term on 1 May 2026 by 150 delegates of the 124th Diocesan Assembly in Milwaukee. ★ Re-elected May 2026
Primate of the Western Diocese of the Armenian Church of North America, seated in Los Angeles — the largest Armenian community outside Armenia and Russia, and therefore one of the most consequential Armenian pulpits anywhere.
Prelate of the Armenian Apostolic Church's Eastern United States Prelacy — the parallel American jurisdiction that answers to Cilicia rather than Etchmiadzin . Two Armenian hierarchies in the same cities: the four-throne structure exported to America.
Archbishop of the Syriac Orthodox Archdiocese of the Eastern United States and the patriarch's exarch there — pastor to a community rebuilt in America from the wreckage of the Sayfo and, a century later, the Syrian war.
Syriac · Malankara Archdiocese, N. America · since 2004
Archbishop and Patriarchal Vicar of the Malankara Archdiocese of the Syriac Orthodox Church in North America since 2004 — the Indian Jacobite community in the United States and Canada, one church holding two continents together.
Syriac · Metropolitan of the Netherlands · since 2007
Patriarchal Vicar for the Netherlands since 2007 and a scholar-bishop — the Syriac diaspora's centre of gravity in Europe, and one of the few hierarchs in this deck equally at home in a monastery and a university seminar.
Bishop of Sydney since 2002, with a jurisdiction that runs across New South Wales, Queensland, the Northern Territory and out into Asia — one of the widest geographic charges held by any bishop in this deck.
5♥Photo: Gerard van Honthorst · Public domain · credit
Bishop David
Coptic · New York & New England · since 2013
Consecrated in Cairo in November 2013 and enthroned that December as the first bishop of the newly created Coptic Diocese of New York and New England — a diocese that did not exist a generation ago, and a measure of how fast the Coptic diaspora has grown.
The fourth catch of this build. Enthroned Bishop of Melbourne in 1999 and still listed as such almost everywhere — but he resigned that see, was permanently discharged from it, and now serves in the Los Angeles diocese alongside Metropolitan Serapion. ★ Catch · no longer of Melbourne
Malankara Orthodox · UK, Europe & Africa · since 2022
Metropolitan of the UK, Europe and Africa diocese since 2022 — the Indian Orthodox of the Western diaspora, a community whose growth in Britain has outpaced almost every other Eastern Christian body there.
Named in 2025 to two charges at once: Archbishop of the Ethiopian monasteries in Jerusalem — an ancient and bitterly contested presence at the Holy Sepulchre — and of the Colorado diocese in North America. Antiquity and diaspora in one appointment.
♣The Voicesthe living scholars · who keeps the memory and the languages · 13 cards
The shortest suit, and it should trouble us. These churches produced Athanasius and Ephrem; the number
of living people in the world who can read their literature in the original is small enough to name. Half this suit
is not Oriental Orthodox at all — a Turkish historian, an English Oxford don, a Belgian at Duke. The memory of
these churches is partly being kept by outsiders, which is either a debt of honour or a warning, depending on how
long it holds.
A♣SB
Sebastian Brock
Oxford · the foremost living Syriacist
Born 1938; Emeritus Reader in Syriac Studies and Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. Fellow of the British Academy, Leverhulme medallist, and holder of the Medal of St Ephrem from the Syriac patriarch himself. If one living person is the field, it is him. Verified 07-25
Founded Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute in Piscataway, New Jersey, and runs Gorgias Press, which publishes most of what is printed in this field. Began as a Cambridge doctoral student merging Syriac with computing — digital humanities before the phrase existed.
Inaugural director of the Armenian Genocide Research Program at UCLA's Promise Armenian Institute, formerly of Clark University. The Turkish scholar who broke his own country's denial from inside the Ottoman archives — and paid for it. Verified 07-25
Poet and historian; won the 2016 Pulitzer for Ozone Journal and the Lemkin Prize for The Burning Tigris . Still writing and still teaching — New York Trilogy appeared in 2025. His grandmother survived the genocide he spent a life documenting.
Ethiopian scholar of Ge'ez and the Semitic languages, and of Ethiopian civilisation; Harvard's first professor of Afro-American studies . Directs the Institute of Semitic Studies from Princeton and chairs the Ethiopian Peace and Development Center.
Senior Fellow at Hudson and at Hoover; author of Motherland Lost: The Egyptian and Coptic Quest for Modernity . The most cited living analyst of the Copts' political position — the man to read before saying anything about Christians in Egypt. ⚠︎ Re-checked 2026-10-08: Still Senior Fellow, Hudson Center for Religious Freedom, and author of Motherland Lost (Hoover, 2013), but Hoover now says he "was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow" there - Hoover role is past, not current. End date not given.
Co-editor with Brock, Kiraz and Van Rompay of the Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage — the single reference work that made this field navigable for outsiders. The generation that has to carry it after Brock.
Duke, emeritus · co-editor, the Gorgias Dictionary
Belgian Syriacist, emeritus at Duke, and the fourth name on the Gorgias Dictionary's spine. His specialism — Syriac biblical interpretation — is the discipline that lets us read how the churches of Antioch heard Scripture before the split.
Appointed to the Mashtots Chair at Harvard in 2022 — the first woman and first person of Armenian descent ever to hold it — and now Chair of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations . Four books and over a hundred essays on medieval Armenian art and architecture, much of it on churches now standing in territory Armenians no longer hold. Verified 07-26
Professor of Ethiopian Studies at Hamburg since 2009 and director of the Hiob Ludolf Centre ; editor of Aethiopica . The leading philologist of Ethiopic manuscripts — which matters more than usual for a church whose synod split in two (see the ♦ suit) and whose claim rests on its own written tradition. Verified 07-26
Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies and Professor of History at Yale, working on Egyptian Christianity, the Coptic language, epigraphy and papyrology . Founder of the Yale Monastic Archaeology Project , digging at four Egyptian sites since 2006 — the rare Voice who works in the ground rather than the library. Verified 07-26
French historian of the Syriac world at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, and among the foremost of the continental Syriacists. The French school is the counterweight to the Anglophone one that occupies most of this suit. Verified 07-26
Professor emeritus of the Orthodox Theological Seminary, Kottayam , professor of Syriac at SEERI , and a priest of the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church itself . ★ Of the thirteen Voices, he is the only one whose desk is inside the region and inside the church he studies — everyone else reads these traditions from Oxford, Harvard, Yale, Hamburg, Paris or Princeton. Verified 07-26
Figures Deck · companion to Dossier IX · Oriental Orthodox · LAMPSTAND 7 Forty-nine names — the full deck. Ten thrones, thirteen fault lines, thirteen shepherds in exile, and thirteen
scholars holding the languages open. Ten, not thirteen, at the top: there is no eleventh throne to find.
Verified living and in office 2026-07-25 and 2026-07-26 — a check that caught six names a memory-built deck would
have got wrong, and that confirmed Sebastian Brock (87) and Ephraim Isaac (90) are both still working. ☩ The oldest wound, most nearly healed ☩
