IRINEOS I

Patriarch by the Mercy of God, of the Holy City of Jerusalem, All Palestine, Syria of Arabia, Beyond the Jordan, Cana of Galilee and Holy Sion.

"On 13 August 2001, in a closely contested race, the Greek Orthodox Church elected Metropolitan Irineos I, a 62-year-old bishop, as its new patriarch in the Holy City. " Irineos I, born Emmanuel Skopelitis in 1939 on the eastern Aegean Island of Samos, was elected in two rounds of voting. Irineos I, who came to Jerusalem in 1953, at age 15 and studied at the Greek Orthodox Seminary on Mt. Zion, graduated from the church's theological seminary in 1963. He became a monk and was ordained as a deacon in 1959; as a church elder in 1965, followed by his ordination as an archimandrite the following year. He studied theology at the University of Athens. He served as editor of the New Zion review and as president of the Ecclesiastical Court of Appeals in Jerusalem before he was appointed as the patriarchate's representative to Greece in 1979. He returned to Jerusalem after the death of Patriarch Diodoros.

FULL BIOGRAPHY IN GREEK LANGUAGE