His Beatitude Anastasios Yannatoulatos, Orthodox Archbishop of Tirana and Primate of Albania, died today in Athens at the age of 95. The Community of Sant'Egidio joins in the condolences and prayers of his Church and remembers him as a good shepherd, a man of dialogue and peace, a dearest friend.
A friendship that began the early 1990s, at the beginning of his mission in Albania - where he rebuilt the Orthodox Church on the human and material ruins of Enver Hoxha's time, and has continued over long years of mutual meetings and visits, in the common commitment to ecumenical and inter-religious dialogue. He participated in the International Meetings for Peace in the Spirit of Assisi since 1993. He hosted the Meeting ‘Peace is always possible’ in Tirana in 2015.
‘The opposite of peace is not war, but egocentrism: individual, collective, ethnic, racial. - he said on that occasion in his introductory address - Egocentrism mobilises the various forms of violence, which kill peace through various ways. This is the inspiration and instigation of both large and small conflicts; this is what bombards human persons and communities continuously with hatred.'
His personal history crosses various worlds - as noted in the book dedicated to him in 2022, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his episcopate, edited by Roberto Morozzo and Tommaso Opocher, ‘Anastasios of Albania, man of many homelands’ . Since his birth in Piraeus and his youth in Greece, he had been at the service of Orthodoxy in a variety of forms, including a mission in East Africa, and in 1991 he finally arrived in Albania.
He was proud, rightly so, of the resurrection of Orthodoxy in the country, fruit of his faith, his evangelical charisma, his missionary spirit and dedication. Yet he was not just the re-founder of a local Church. He was a personality well known internationally, and had become a spiritual and moral reference point for the whole of Orthodoxy, for his constant appeal to all to communion and fraternity, opposing any political or ethnic logic. He said he aspired to be oikoumenikos anthropos - ‘to be an ecumenical man, understood as a synonym for a disciple of Christ who embraces everything’.
Andrea Riccardi has written of him: ‘Despite the smallness of his Church, Anastasios is a great figure in the contemporary Church: a man of faith, inspirer of an orthodox humanism that can make a real contribution to global humanism’.
