Archbishop Damaskinos

Damaskinos
Archbishop of Athens
Archibishop Damaskinos , 1945
Installed	1941
Term ended	1949
Predecessor	Chrysanthus
Successor	Spyridon
Personal details
Birth name	Dimitrios Papandreou
Born	(1891-03-03)3 March 1891 Dorvitsa, Greece
Died	20 May 1949(1949-05-20) (aged 58) Athens, Greece
Denomination	Greek Orthodox

Archbishop Damaskinos Papandreou (March 3, 1891 – May 20, 1949) was the archbishop of Athens and All Greece from 1941 until his death. He was also the regent of Greece between the pull-out of the German occupation force in 1944 and the return of King George II to Greece in 1946. His rule was between the liberation of Greece from the German occupation during World War II and the Greek Civil War.

He was born Dimitrios Papandreou (no relation to the Papandreou political family from Achaea) in Dorvitsa, Greece. He enlisted in the Greek army during the Balkan Wars. He was ordained a priest of the Greek Orthodox Church in 1917. In 1922, he was made Bishop of Corinth. He spent the early 1930s as an ambassador of the Ecumenical Patriarch in the United States, where he labored to help organize the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America.

In 1938 he was elected Archbishop of Athens, taking the name Damaskinos. Ioannis Metaxas, dictator of Greece at the time, objected to Damaskinos and forced the cancellation of his election, and the appointment of Metropolitan Chrysanthus to the post. After the 1941 German invasion of Greece and the fall of the Greek government, the Metropolitans who had elected Damaskinos seized the opportunity to eject Chrysanthus from the throne (with German agreement, as the latter had refused to be present at the oath-taking ceremony of the quisling Prime Minister Georgios Tsolakoglu), and Damaskinos was reinstalled.