There were several failed attempts to repair the
East-West Schism between Greek and Latin
Christians: the
Council of Bari in 1098, the
Council of Lyon in 1274, and the
Council of Florence in 1439. Subsequently, many individual
Greeks, then under
Ottoman rule, embraced
communion with the
Catholic Church. They typically followed the
Roman Rite of the
Latin Church, maintaining their parishes through contact and support mostly from the
Venetians. However, it was not until the 1880s that a particular church specifically for Greek Catholics who followed the Byzantine rite was built in the village of
Malgara in
Thrace. Before the end of the 19th century, two more such churches were built, one in
Constantinople and the other in
Chalcedon. In 1826, Catholic Jesuit priest John Marangos began a mission among the Orthodox Christians of Constantinople, where he managed the construction of a small community. In 1878, he moved on to
Athens, where he died in 1885 after he had founded a church. In addition, he won over two small villages in Thrace to the Catholic faith. After 1895, the
Assumptionists began their mission in Constantinople, a seminary and two other small towns, founded in 1910; there were about 1,000 worshipers with 12 priests, 10 of which were Assumptionists. In 1907, a native
Greek priest,
Isaias Papadopoulos, the priest who had built the church in Thrace, was appointed
vicar general for the Greek Catholics within the Apostolic Delegation of Constantinople, and in 1911, he received
episcopal consecration and was put in charge of the newly established ordinariate for Greek Byzantine Rite Catholics, which later became an
exarchate. The
particular church of Byzantine Rite Greek Catholics was being founded. Much more numerous were the Catholic Greeks of the
Latin Church, who formed the majority of the population in some
Aegean islands. As a result of
the conflict between Greece and Turkey after the
First World War, the Greek Catholics of
Malgara and of the neighbouring village of
Daudeli moved to
Giannitsa in
Macedonia, where today lives a sizeable community, and many of those who lived in
Istanbul emigrated or fled to
Athens, one being the
bishop who had succeeded to the position of
exarch, and the
religious institute of the Sisters of the Pammakaristos, founded in 1920. In 1932, the territory of the Exarchate for Byzantine-Rite Greek Catholics was limited to that of the
Greek state, and a separate
Exarchate of Constantinople was established for those resident in
Turkey. Continued emigration and anti-Greek nationalist incidents by Turks, such as the
Istanbul Pogrom, extremely reduced the number of the Greek Catholics in Turkey. The last resident Greek-Catholic priest in
Constantinople died in 1997 and has not since been replaced. The only regular services in the
Greek-Catholic Church of the Holy Trinity there are held by exiled
Chaldean Catholics living in the city. Vocations to the Greek Byzantine Catholic Church are largely drawn from the
Greek islands of
Syros and
Tinos, which both have sizable Catholic populations. Bishop
Manuel Nin (
titular bishop of
Carcabia) is current Apostolic
Exarch of the Byzantine Rite Catholics in
Greece. Byzantine Rite Catholic Greeks in Greece number were mildly rising to 6,016 (6,000 in Greece and 16 in Turkey) as of 2017. In Athens, the main Greek Catholic church is the
Holy Trinity Cathedral, Athens. Although not under the jurisdiction of the Greek Byzantine Catholic Church, a Greek-Catholic community of the descendants of expatriated Greeks exists at
Cargèse, in
Corsica. A priest based in
Athens,
Archimandrite Athanasios Armaos, visits Cargèse several times a year to conduct services in the Greek church. ==Byzantine Greek Catholics==