Jeremias I of Constantinople

Saint Jeremias I was Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople twice, from 1522 to 1524 and from 1525 to 1546, in the time of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. The Ecumenical Patriarchate numbered him among the saints on 10 January 2023 and remembers him each year on 13 January.

He was born in 1485 at Zitsa in Epirus. He had no advanced schooling but had great gifts of administration and was loved by the people. He was metropolitan of Sofia before 1513. On 31 December 1522, with the support of the archon Konstantinos Kounoupis, the Synod elected him patriarch of Constantinople, and the gifts to the sultan were reckoned at five hundred French coins and three thousand five hundred florins, as an annual debt. Soon after his election he set out for Cyprus, Egypt, Sinai and Palestine, to serve at the Holy Sepulchre. While he was in Jerusalem the clergy and notables of Constantinople deposed him uncanonically, in April or May 1524, and put in his place the metropolitan of Sozopolis, Joannicius. Jeremias, with Patriarchs Joachim I of Alexandria, Michael V of Antioch and Dorotheus II of Jerusalem, whom he called to Jerusalem, excommunicated Joannicius. He returned to Constantinople, was received with joy by the people, and was officially restored on 24 September 1525, by the sultan's berat. From then on he had great influence and an authority beyond that of earlier patriarchs, who had been changed often in the fifteenth century.

In 1536 the former cell of Stavronikita, which had belonged since 1287 to the monastery of Koutloumousiou and then, until 1533, to Philotheou, was raised to the rank of monastery, the twentieth on Mount Athos, the last one officially recognized. At the invitation of the Holy Community the patriarch took part personally in its rebuilding and remained its benefactor, and in 1544 he declared it stavropegial. He also restored the monastery of Saint Luke (Hosios Loukas). During his patriarchate he managed to save many churches threatened with demolition by the Turks, with the argument that the city had surrendered and had not been conquered. In 1537 he obtained a firman of the sultan Suleiman stopping the conversion of churches in Constantinople into mosques, but the decision was not confirmed by Suleiman's successors. It seems that then too the custom was established that hierarchs give, at their election, a gift of money to the Patriarchate for its support. In October 1538 he gave a part of his property to the Patriarchate.

He was patriarch until 1546, when he fell ill. According to some sources he left the throne and retired to the Bistritsa monastery near Vratsa, in today's Bulgaria, where he was tonsured into the great schema with the name John. He died at Vratsa on 13 January 1546, on his way to Wallachia.