The Constantinopolitan Tradition

In Brief

The Constantinopolitan tradition is the liturgical tradition of the Church of Constantinople, one of the five Eastern traditions named in the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches, and today the most widely celebrated rite of the Christian East.^1,2,3 Its heart is the Divine Liturgy, in the books' own name for it: the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom on most days of the year, the longer Liturgy of St Basil on ten days — the Sundays of Great Lent, the eves of Christmas and Theophany, Holy Thursday, Holy Saturday and St Basil's day — and the Presanctified Liturgy, which is Vespers with Communion, on the weekdays of the Great Fast.^4,5

Its anaphoras follow the Antiochene order — dialogue, thanksgiving, Sanctus, post-Sanctus, institution, anamnesis and offering, a single epiclesis after the institution, intercessions, doxology — but the rite is Constantinople's own, and Catholic law names it a tradition in its own right, not a branch of the Antiochene.^1,4,6 Its marks are leavened bread — the round stamped prosphora, from which the Lamb is cut at the Preparation — and Communion in both kinds together by spoon.^6,7 The Liturgy moves through the Little Entrance with the Gospel book and the Great Entrance with the Gifts, with the deacon leading litany after litany, before an icon screen whose holy doors open and close through the service.⁶

It is prayed by fourteen Catholic Churches — Ukrainians, Melkites, Ruthenians, Romanians, Hungarians, Slovaks, and the smaller Churches of the Balkans and Italy — and by the Eastern Orthodox, who are the great majority of its people.^4,8 The liturgical languages are Greek, Church Slavonic and Arabic, with each people also praying in its own tongue.^3,9 The year runs on the movable Paschal cycle: the Triodion of Lent, the Pentecostarion of the Paschal season, the eight-tone Octoechos, and the twelve-volume Menaion of the fixed feasts.⁴

Member Rites & Uses

• Byzantine RiteRite
• Ruthenian usageRecension of the Byzantine Rite
• Ukrainian usage (Kyivan tradition)Recension of the Byzantine Rite
• Melkite usageRecension of the Byzantine Rite

Churches

Fourteen Catholic Churches sui iuris pray in this tradition, from the great Ukrainian and Melkite Churches to the small exarchates of the Balkans, Italy and Greece.⁸

Catholic Churches sui iuris

• Ukrainian Greek Catholic ChurchMajor archiepiscopal Church³
• Melkite Greek Catholic ChurchPatriarchal Church³
• Ruthenian Greek Catholic ChurchMetropolitan Church (Pittsburgh), with jurisdictions subject to the Holy See³
• Romanian Church United with Rome, Greek-CatholicMajor archiepiscopal Church³
• Hungarian Greek Catholic ChurchMetropolitan Church³
• Slovak Greek Catholic ChurchMetropolitan Church³
• Italo-Albanian Catholic ChurchTwo eparchies and a territorial abbey (Grottaferrata)³
• Greek Catholic Church of Croatia and SerbiaTwo eparchies (Križevci; Ruski Krstur)³
• Macedonian Greek Catholic ChurchOne eparchy³
• Bulgarian Greek Catholic ChurchOne eparchy³
• Belarusian Greek Catholic ChurchApostolic Administration (erected 2023)³
• Greek Byzantine Catholic ChurchTwo apostolic exarchates (Greece; Istanbul)³
• Russian Greek Catholic ChurchTwo apostolic exarchates without their own hierarchs³
• Albanian Greek Catholic ChurchOther Church sui iuris, without a hierarchy of its own⁸

The registry records only the Catholic Churches. Most of those who pray the Byzantine rite belong to the Eastern Orthodox Churches, which celebrate the same Divine Liturgies of St John Chrysostom and St Basil within the same liturgical year; they are not in communion with Rome.^4,10

Signature

Calendar

The movable Paschal cycle: the Triodion and Pentecostarion, the eight-tone Octoechos, and the twelve-volume Menaion for the fixed feasts⁴

Bread

Leavened wheat bread — the stamped prosphora, whose centre, the 'Lamb', is cut out at the Preparation⁷

Languages

Greek, Church Slavonic and Arabic, with each people also praying in its own tongue³

Typical anaphora shape

The Antiochene order — dialogue, thanksgiving, Sanctus, post-Sanctus, institution, anamnesis and offering, a single epiclesis, intercessions, doxology⁴

The Shape of the Liturgy

The anaphora of St John Chrysostom: the deacon's diptychs of the dead and of the living are read interleaved with the intercessions, not after them.⁶

• Opening dialogue
• Preface / thanksgiving
• Pre-Sanctus
• Sanctus
• Post-Sanctus
• Epiclesis (before institution)
• Institution narrative
• Anamnesis
• Offering
• Epiclesis (after anamnesis)
• Intercessions
• Commemorations / diptychs
• Doxology

Each colour is one part of the eucharistic prayer, in the order the prayer says it. Compare every anaphora.

History

None of the rite's anaphoras began in Constantinople. The Liturgy of St John Chrysostom descends, in Robert Taft's account, from a lost Greek "Anaphora of the Apostles" in use at Antioch by the middle of the fourth century; the pre-Sanctus carries phrases found elsewhere only in Chrysostom's homilies, and Taft judged his redaction of that prayer "the only probable one under the circumstances", made after he became bishop of Constantinople in 398.¹¹ The attribution is older than the manuscripts: it appears only between the mid-sixth and eighth centuries, and Guéranger wrote in 1840 that Chrysostom "is not the author of the Liturgy that bears his name".^4,12 The anaphora of St Basil survives in Egyptian, Armenian, Syriac and Byzantine forms; the Byzantine text is an expansion that Streza's study of Basil's vocabulary supports as carrying his print.⁵

The rite took shape in the cathedral of Justinian's Hagia Sophia, dedicated in 537 — a building, Taft argued, that shaped the ritual it housed.¹³ The Cherubic Hymn entered the Liturgy in 573–574.¹³ The oldest witness, the euchologion Barberini gr. 336 of about 780–800, already holds the liturgies of Basil and Chrysostom and the Presanctified; in it Basil comes first, and before about the year 1000 his was the principal eucharistic text of Constantinople.^5,6 By the eleventh century Chrysostom's had become the daily Liturgy of the Great Church.⁴

The rite as it stands is a monastic achievement. Theodore of Stoudios, who died in 826, brought the monks of St Sabas from Palestine to the capital, and their office was fused with the cathedral's into a Studite synthesis.¹⁴ After the crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204 the old cathedral office disappeared from Hagia Sophia, and the monastic office, reworked on Mount Athos in the fourteenth century, became "basically the Byzantine Rite we know today".^4,14 Olkinuora notes that Taft's account has since been "seriously reconsidered" by newer scholarship.⁴

The conventional date of the division between East and West is 1054, when legates of Rome laid a bull of excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia.¹⁵ The rupture endured: Vatican II's decree on ecumenism devoted a section to the separated Eastern Churches, treating their apostolic faith and liturgical life as a patrimony to be respected.¹⁰

From the sixteenth century, Byzantine communities entered communion with Rome while keeping their rite: the Kyivan metropolia at Brest in 1595–96, the priests of Mukachevo at Uzhhorod in 1646, the Romanians at Alba Iulia in 1698–1700, and the Melkite Catholic patriarchate from 1724.^9,16,17,18 In each case only part of the mother Church entered the union.⁸ John Paul II wrote of Brest that it had not meant passing over to the Latin tradition.¹⁶ Latinization came all the same, and the correction came gradually: Leo XIII's Orientalium dignitas in 1894, Vatican II's call to return to the ancestral traditions in 1964, and the 1996 Instruction's demand for an organic recovery of the rite's proper usages.^19,20,21 In 1993 the joint commission at Balamand agreed that "uniatism" as a method of union could no longer be accepted.²²

Today fourteen Catholic Churches of the Byzantine tradition stand alongside the Eastern Orthodox Churches, who remain the great majority of those who pray it.^4,8 The largest is the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which in 2023 moved its fixed feasts to the new calendar while keeping the traditional Paschalion.²³ Printing fixed the Greek texts in the sixteenth century — the liturgies at Rome in 1526, the Euchologion at Venice the same year — and the books have carried the tradition into every continent since.⁶

Milestones

1. c. 780–800Barberini gr. 336, the oldest Byzantine euchologion, already holds the liturgies of Basil and Chrysostom and the Presanctified⁶
2. c. 800–826Theodore of Stoudios (d. 826) brings the Sabaite monks of Palestine to Constantinople; their office fuses with the cathedral's into the Studite synthesis¹⁴
3. 1054Legates of Rome lay a bull of excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia — the conventional date of the East–West division¹⁵
4. 1204The Fourth Crusade sacks Constantinople; the old cathedral office disappears from the Great Church⁴
5. 1595–96Union of Brest: the Kyivan metropolia enters communion with Rome, keeping its Eastern liturgical and spiritual heritage¹⁶
6. 1646Union of Uzhhorod: sixty-three priests of the eparchy of Mukachevo enter communion with Rome in the castle church¹⁷
7. 1894Leo XIII's Orientalium dignitas penalizes any Latin missionary who draws Eastern faithful to the Latin rite¹⁹
8. 1964Vatican II's Orientalium Ecclesiarum §6: Eastern Catholics 'can and should always preserve their legitimate liturgical rite'²⁰

Sources

1. Magisterial / canonicalCode of Canons of the Eastern Churches, Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1990, can. 28 §2. LinkVerified 2026-09-12 · URL repointed 18 Sep 2026 to the Latin text on vatican.va (part 1; cann. 656–657 are in part 2, codex-can-eccl-orient-2), because the caedm.ca English extract (616A) carries cc. 27–38 only; cann. 28, 40 §1, 656, 657 read there in the Latin, 18 Sep 2026. English translation: cann. 27–28 read in the caedm.ca PDF; cann. 671, 697, 707, 710, 713 read in the IntraText English edition; can. 881 §1 in IntraText, 2026-09-14
2. ReferencePew Research Center, Orthodox Christianity in the 21st Century, 2017. LinkVerified 2026-09-12 · read (8 Nov 2017 report)
3. ReferenceGCatholic.org, Byzantine Churches sui iuris and their jurisdictions, 2026, rite pages; 'official language' fields; Ukrainian rite page; Melkite rite page; Ruthenian rite page; Romanian rite page; Hungarian rite page; Slovak rite page; Italo-Albanian rite page; Croatia and Serbia rite page; Macedonian rite page; Bulgarian rite page; Belarusian rite page; Greek rite page; Russian rite page. LinkVerified 2026-09-12 · rite pages read; each Byzantine diocese page summed, 14 Sep 2026 (totals undated)
4. ScholarshipOlkinuora, Damaskinos, “Liturgy of the Byzantine Rite”, St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology, 2024, §§3.3.1–3.3.3; §3.3; §3; §2; §2.3. LinkVerified 2026-09-12 · signed, peer-reviewed entry read in full (§§2–3)
5. ScholarshipStreza, Ciprian, “The Authorship of the Byzantine Anaphora of Saint Basil under Investigation with the TLG Database”, Revista Teologică 98, no. 3, 2016, 133–194, p. 134; pp. 135, 194; p. 133. LinkVerified 2026-09-12 · full PDF read; pp. 133–139 and conclusions p. 194 checked
6. Primary textBrightman, F. E., Liturgies Eastern and Western, vol. 1: Eastern Liturgies, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896, pp. 383–390; pp. 356–357, 395–396; pp. 367, 377–379; glossary, s.v. Cancelli; pp. 388–389; pp. lxxxviii–lxxxix; pp. lxxxiii, lxxxv. LinkVerified 2026-09-12 · archive.org full text; pp. lxxxiii, lxxxv, lxxxviii–lxxxix checked; order locators spot-checked 13 Sep 2026 (pp. 362, 377–378, 393, 394; glossary s.v. Zeon, Cancelli, Ektene). Checked 19 Sep 2026 for the Ge'ez entry: Preface p. xiii, the Ethiopic translations are the Rev. C. J. Ball's ('the Rev. C. J. Ball for the Ethiopic (including the collation of the British Museum manuscripts)'); p. lxiii, the Egyptian rite; pp. lxxii-lxxiii, the Rome printing of 1548 ('Testamentum novum.. Missale') and the Lord's anaphora there; pp. 194-244, the Ethiopic Liturgy of the Apostles from BM Or. 545 (1670-75); p. 232, 'THIS bread… IS MY BODY' (a rubric between) and 'DRINK… THIS CUP'
7. Magisterial / canonicalCouncil of Hierarchs of the Byzantine Metropolitan Church sui iuris of Pittsburgh, Norms of Particular Law of the Byzantine Metropolitan Church sui iuris of Pittsburgh, U.S.A., 1999, c. 707 §1. LinkVerified 2026-09-12 · cc. 697, 707, 710 read
8. ReferenceCatholic Near East Welfare Association (CNEWA), The Catholic Eastern Churches, the Catholic Eastern Churches; the four categories of Eastern Catholic Churches. LinkVerified 2026-09-12 · read in a browser (automated requests are blocked): the unions, latinization, and the four canonical categories listing the fourteen Byzantine Churches
9. ReferenceGallaro, George D., “Melkite Greek Catholic Church”, New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., 2003. LinkVerified 2026-09-12 · read
10. Magisterial / canonicalSecond Vatican Council, Unitatis Redintegratio, 1964, §§14–17. LinkVerified 2026-09-12 · §§14-17 read on vatican.va
11. ScholarshipTaft, Robert F., “The Authenticity of the Chrysostom Anaphora Revisited: Determining the Authorship of Liturgical Texts by Computer”, Orientalia Christiana Periodica 56, 1990, 5–51, pp. 20, 32–36.Verified 2026-09-12 · read in the Variorum reprint (Taft 1995, no. III); abbreviations and conclusions checked; pp. 20, 32–36 re-read 13 Sep 2026
12. ScholarshipGuéranger, Prosper, Institutions liturgiques, vol. 1, Le Mans: Fleuriot, 1840, p. 228. LinkVerified 2026-09-13 · archive.org full text; p. 228 by running head; the English gloss is ours
13. ScholarshipTaft, Robert F., “The Liturgy of the Great Church: An Initial Synthesis of Structure and Interpretation on the Eve of Iconoclasm”, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 34–35, 1981, 45–75, §1; §8.Verified 2026-09-12 · read in the Variorum reprint (Taft 1995, no. I), §§1, 5, 7
14. ScholarshipTaft, Robert F., Liturgy in Byzantium and Beyond, Aldershot: Variorum, 1995, no. VI.Verified 2026-09-12 · reprinted studies nos. I–III and V–VI read (incl. 'A Tale of Two Cities', no. VI; its p. 23 re-read 13 Sep 2026)
15. ScholarshipFortescue, Adrian, The Orthodox Eastern Church, London: Catholic Truth Society, 1907, p. 128. LinkVerified 2026-09-13 · archive.org full text of the 1908 printing (first published 1907; 1907 pagination not checked); pp. 386-388 by running heads
16. Magisterial / canonicalJohn Paul II, Apostolic Letter for the Fourth Centenary of the Union of Brest, 1995, §1. LinkVerified 2026-09-12 · read on vatican.va
17. Magisterial / canonicalJohn Paul II, Apostolic Letter for the 350th Anniversary of the Union of Uzhhorod, 1996, text. LinkVerified 2026-09-12 · read on vatican.va
18. Magisterial / canonicalJohn Paul II, Apostolic Letter for the 300th Anniversary of the Union of the Greek-Catholic Church of Romania with the Church of Rome, 2000. LinkVerified 2026-09-12 · read on vatican.va
19. Magisterial / canonicalLeo XIII, Orientalium Dignitas, 1894, §I. LinkVerified 2026-09-12 · English translation read (introduction and first provision); Latin text not seen
20. Magisterial / canonicalSecond Vatican Council, Orientalium Ecclesiarum, 1964, §6. LinkVerified 2026-09-12 · §6 read in full on vatican.va; §3 read. §6 re-read in Latin on vatican.va by review round 7 (14 Sep 2026, _audit/byzantine-2026-09-14-r7.md)
21. Magisterial / canonicalCongregation for the Eastern Churches, Instruction for Applying the Liturgical Prescriptions of the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches, Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1996, §§12, 108. LinkVerified 2026-09-12 · full text read; §§12, 39, 51, 59, 67, 104, 107, 108 checked
22. Primary textJoint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, Uniatism, Method of Union of the Past, and the Present Search for Full Communion (Balamand), 1993, §§3, 12. LinkVerified 2026-09-12 · §§3 and 12 read on christianunity.va
23. Primary textUkrainian Greek Catholic Church, Historical Decision: The UGCC in Ukraine Switches to a New Calendar, 2023. LinkVerified 2026-09-12 · read on ugcc.ua