ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses recent developments in the Churches of Romania, Russia, Serbia and Greece, which have the largest numbers of expatriates in Western Europe and to which belong the actors that were part of the research. The specificity of their recent history derives from the fact that these Churches have been marked by several decades of communist religious persecution (with the exception of Greece, where the specter of communism nevertheless influenced the life of the Church), followed by a complete reversal of the situation in the early 1990s, when the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe occasioned the “return” of Orthodoxy at all levels of the public sphere and the rehabilitation of the Church as an important social actor in those countries. Orthodox countries have joined the European Union (Greece has been a longstanding member, Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU in 2007, Cyprus joined in 2004 and Serbia is bidding for membership), and this new political situation leads to the fact that the respective Churches are directly connected to and affected by European realities and other global developments.
