Mar Ephrem
Mar Ephrem (born 1955) is the Archbishop of Iyık Janyl and primate of the Syro-Iradi Catholic Church. He was proposed by the Syro-Iradi Council of Hierarchs and appointed by the Holy See in 2012, succeeding Mar Yuhanna Bakirov, archbishop since 1992, and was enthroned at the Church of St. Janyl.[1]
Born in the Talas valley, he was ordained in secret in 1981, when the church still had no legal existence in the Iradi SSR. After 1992 he studied at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome, and from 2004 to 2012 he was bishop of the suffragan Eparchy of Talas. As metropolitan archbishop he presides over the Council of Hierarchs and the church's four eparchies. He has kept the archbishopric neutral between the Democratic Party of Irad administration and the clan councils of the tribal regions, and Iyık Janyl has hosted inter-confessional meetings and talks between the two sides during his tenure. He has also maintained the itinerant priests who celebrate the liturgy in tent chapels in the Autonomous Tribal Regions.[1][2]
External links
- Church of St. Janyl (official website of the cathedral and archeparchy)
References
- ^ Cathedral Archives of Iyık Janyl, Diocesan Register and Chronicle of the Syro-Iradi Synod, Codex VII (1988–2022).
- ^ Talas State University Press (2023). Sacred Toponymy and Ecclesiastical Monasteries of Iyık Janyl, pp. 78–95.