page_title: Orthodox Church of Finland
section_title: Autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland
hierarchical_section_title: Orthodox Church of Finland / History / Autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland
caption_attribution_description: Turku orthodox church (the orthodox church of the holy Alexandra) in w:Turku, Finland
context_page_description: The Orthodox Church of Finland is an autonomous Eastern Orthodox archdiocese of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. The church has a legal position as a national church in the country, along with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland.
  With its roots in the medieval Novgorodian missionary work in Karelia, the Orthodox Church of Finland was a part of the Russian Orthodox Church until 1923. Today the church has three dioceses and 59,000 members that account for 1.1 percent of the native population of Finland. The parish of Helsinki has the most adherents.
context_section_description: When all of Finland became an autonomous Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire in 1809, it already had an established Lutheran Church. Eastern Orthodox Christianity also gained a recognized status in Finland. The old Swedish constitution which Finns generally regarded as the constitution of the Grand Duchy, specifically required that the sovereign was Protestant, but this was overlooked regarding the Orthodox Emperors.
  In areas where Orthodox faith was not indigenous as in the towns of Helsinki, Tampere and Viipuri and the Karelian Isthmus, Orthodoxy was especially associated with the Russians, most of whom were Russian troops permanently stationed in Finland. The birth of Helsinki's Orthodox Church is generally associated with the construction of the Holy Trinity Church, Helsinki in 1827. Generally most ecclesiastical activity outside Karelia centered on the garrison churches. There were also a growing number of Russian emigrants, most of whom were merchants or craftsmen. These started to identify themselves with the Swedish-speaking bourgeoisie, and so a Swedish-speaking branch of the Finnish Orthodox Church was born.
  The 19th century was also a period of active building of new churches, the Uspenski Cathedral being the most important of them. The garrisons needed Orthodox churches and so did the new emigrants to the towns. A good examples are the Orthodox church of Tampere and Turku.
  In the rural countryside of Karelia, the local form of Orthodox faith remained somewhat primitive, incorporating many features of older religious praxis. Literacy among the Orthodox population was low. In 1900 it was estimated that of all persons over the age of 15 in East Finland, 32 percent were illiterate. The Orthodox population knew very little of their faith except the outer forms. The priests were generally Russians who seldom knew Finnish. As Karelia and its arable land was poor, it did not attract first class priests. The language of the services was Church Slavonic, a form of old Bulgarian. A Russian could understand some parts of the services, a Finnish-speaking person nothing.
  A separate Finnish episcopate with a leading archbishop was established in 1892 under the Russian Orthodox Church. It was stationed in Vyborg, with the Russian Antoniy as its first bishop.
  When Russia at the end of the 19th century tried to retract the autonomy of Finland, the Lutheran Finns started to associate the Orthodox Church with the imperial Russian rule, labeled as the ryssän kirkko. The cultural gap between the two churches remained significant.
caption: Church of the Holy Martyr Empress Alexandra in Turku, consecrated 9 September 1845.
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