Until the beginning of the twentieth century, the title of the Patriarch of Alexandria sounded like this: “Pope and Patriarch of the Great City of Alexandria, Libya, Pentapolis, Ethiopia, all Egypt.” This is the traditional and generally accepted canonical territory of the Alexandrian Patriarchate in Orthodoxy. Priest Georgy Maksimov, a teacher at the Moscow Theological Academy, writes about this.

Egypt, Libya, Ethiopia – that’s all. And according to the sixth canon of the First Ecumenical Council and the second canon of the Second Ecumenical Council, the power of the Bishop of Alexandria extended only “to the whole of Egypt.” This is due to the fact that historically several Local Churches coexisted on the African continent – Alexandrian, Carthaginian and Ethiopian. And only after the Ethiopian Church fell away into Monophysitism, and the Carthaginian Church disappeared under the blows of the Arabs, the Alexandrian Church remained the only Orthodox Church in Africa, however, claiming only some of its northern regions as its canonical territory.

Only the notorious Meletios (Metaxakis), who was in the Alexandria cathedra from 1926 to 1935, added the words “and all of Africa” ​​to his title. <…>

I have heard that the Patriarch of Constantinople recognized the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Alexandria over the whole of Africa only in the 1970s in exchange for the transfer of the American Exarchate of the Church of Alexandria to the jurisdiction of Constantinople, ”the priest explains.

All of these were not the reasons that prompted the Russian Orthodox Church to open its jurisdiction in Africa. The reason was the recognition of the OCU and the desire of Russian Orthodox Christians living in Africa, he explained.