ISTANBUL — The chime of church bells mixed with the Islamic call to prayer as the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians granted the Ukrainian Church independence from Moscow, marking the biggest rupture in Christianity in centuries and risking the ire of both the Russian Church and government.

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew gave the tomos of autocephaly, or decree of independence, to Metropolitan Epifaniy, the newly elected 39-year-old bishop of Ukraine. The move formally ends Moscow’s jurisdiction over the Ukrainian Church after more than 330 years and returns it to the fold of Constantinople, the former name for Istanbul, today a city of some 15 million Muslims.

“The winter is past for schisms and divisions. The rain is over and gone for ecclesiastical isolation. The flower of unity appears on the earth, and the time has come for the glorious Holy Metropolis of Kiev to acquire its ecclesiastical independence,” Bartholomew, 78, told Epifaniy in an elaborate ceremony attended by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and his predecessor Viktor Yushchenko.

Their presence at St. George’s Cathedral on the banks of Istanbul’s Golden Horn underscores how intermeshed the religious rift is with a broader geopolitical dispute following Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in 2014. Russia also backs separatist militants in eastern Ukraine.