ABSTRACT
On July 27, 2013, in an interview on the occasion of the 1,125-year anniversary of the Baptism of Kievan Rus’, the chairman of the Department for External Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev) of Volokolamsk, put forward a new vision of the “canonical territory” of the Russian Orthodox Church. 1 In fact, he had elaborated on this subject in 2005, during his tenure as Bishop of Vienna and Austria of the Moscow Patriarchate, when he served as its representative at European international organizations in Brussels. Then he outlined the canonical territory of the Russian Orthodox Church as embracing thirteen post-Soviet states, namely, the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kirgizstan, Tajikistan, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. 2 Only Georgia and Armenia were not present in this list, because their Orthodox believers belong to the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Georgia. In his interview of 2013, however, Metropolitan Hilarion also counted Japan and China as part of the Russian Orthodox Church’s canonical territory. He justifi ed their inclusion by reference to history: The fi rst Orthodox missionaries there were Russians. At the same time, the Russian hierarch pointed to the right of his church to exercise authority outside this expanded canonical territory due to the necessity of giving spiritual and ecclesiological guidance to the dioceses and parishes of its diaspora.
