Toward a Bulgarian Church

How Paisiy’s work fed the nineteenth-century struggle for an independent Bulgarian Church. The grievance the History named — Bulgarian subordination to a Greek-speaking Phanariot hierarchy — became, three generations later, the central battle of the Revival: the campaign for Bulgarian bishops, Bulgarian liturgy, and a Bulgarian ecclesiastical jurisdiction. It ended, in 1870, with the establishment of the Bulgarian Exarchate by Ottoman firman.

Tradition: Bulgarian Orthodox

From Paisiy’s Grievance to a Movement

Paisiy’s History did not call for a separate Bulgarian Church in institutional terms — the demand belongs to the nineteenth century, not to his (see The Question of Nationalism). But it named, with force, the grievance out of which that demand would grow: the subjection of the Bulgarian people, in their church life, to a hierarchy that spoke Greek, celebrated in Greek, and slighted the Slavonic inheritance and the Bulgarian tongue (Paisiy, Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska, 1762, appeal against Hellenization; see The Bulgarian Lands Under the Ottomans). The History’s insistence that the Bulgarians had once had their own patriarch and their own church culture gave the later movement its charter: what the Bulgarians had possessed, they might justly seek to recover (Daskalov, The Making of a Nation in the Balkans, CEU Press, 2004, ch. 1; Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2005, ch. 3).

Through the first half of the nineteenth century this grievance sharpened. As Bulgarian schools multiplied, a Bulgarian literary language matured, and a Bulgarian merchant and intellectual class emerged, the anomaly of a Bulgarian people served by Greek bishops became intolerable to a growing movement (Crampton, Concise History, 2005, ch. 3; MacDermott, A History of Bulgaria 1393–1885, Allen & Unwin, 1962, chs. 5–9). The abolition of the Archbishopric of Ohrid in 1767 had placed all the Bulgarians under Constantinople; now they sought to reverse that subordination.

The Church Question

By the middle of the century the “church question” (tsŭrkovniyat vŭpros) had become the leading cause of the Bulgarian national movement — for a time more central than the political question of liberation from the Ottomans (Crampton, Concise History, 2005, ch. 3; MacDermott, History of Bulgaria, 1962, chs. 8–9). The demands escalated in stages: first for Bulgarian-speaking bishops in Bulgarian dioceses and the use of Church Slavonic in the liturgy; then for a measure of autonomy within the Patriarchate; and finally for a distinct Bulgarian ecclesiastical jurisdiction (Crampton, Concise History, 2005, ch. 3). The struggle was conducted through petitions to the Sultan and the Patriarch, through the Bulgarian community in Constantinople, through confrontations in the churches, and — at its sharpest, in 1860 — through the public omission of the Ecumenical Patriarch’s name from the liturgy by the Bulgarian bishop Ilarion of Makariopolis, a dramatic act of ecclesiastical defiance (MacDermott, History of Bulgaria, 1962, ch. 9; Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 3rd ed., Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, “Ilarion Makariopolski”). The dispute was, throughout, entangled with the politics of the Ottoman state and of the Great Powers, each of which had interests in the outcome (Crampton, Concise History, 2005, ch. 3).

The Exarchate of 1870

The struggle reached its resolution not through the Patriarchate, which resisted, but through the Ottoman state, which had reasons of its own to grant Bulgarian demands. On 28 February 1870 (per the Julian calendar then in use; 12 March New Style), the Sultan Abdülaziz issued a firman establishing the Bulgarian Exarchate — an autonomous Bulgarian ecclesiastical jurisdiction, headed by an Exarch, with authority over the Bulgarian dioceses (Crampton, Concise History, 2005, ch. 3; MacDermott, History of Bulgaria, 1962, ch. 9; Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 2015, “Bulgarian Exarchate”). The firman created the Exarchate by act of the Ottoman state, over the objection of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and defined the territory of the new jurisdiction — including a provision (the celebrated Article 10) allowing further dioceses to join by a two-thirds vote of their population, a clause that made the Exarchate’s boundaries a matter of national competition in Macedonia and elsewhere (Crampton, Concise History, 2005, ch. 3; Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 2015). The first Exarch, Antim I, was elected in 1872.

The establishment of the Exarchate was, from the national point of view, a triumph — the recovery of an independent Bulgarian ecclesiastical existence for the first time since the medieval patriarchates, and a decisive step toward the recognition of the Bulgarians as a distinct nation (Crampton, Concise History, 2005, ch. 3; MacDermott, History of Bulgaria, 1962, ch. 9). It gave the Bulgarian people, still under Ottoman political rule, an institution of their own — a church that was theirs, in their language, under their own hierarchs. In this sense the Exarchate is the ecclesiastical fulfilment of the impulse Paisiy had voiced: the recovery of a Bulgarian church-life to match the Bulgarian nationhood he had called his people to remember.

The Cost: The Schism of 1872

But the manner of the Exarchate’s creation — by state firman, over the Patriarchate’s objection, on an explicitly national basis — provoked an immediate and grave ecclesiastical reaction. The Patriarchate of Constantinople regarded the establishment of a jurisdiction defined by nationality, overlapping in the same territory with the existing Orthodox hierarchy, as an ecclesiological error, and in 1872 a Council convened at Constantinople condemned the principle it named “phyletism” and declared the Exarchate schismatic (Crampton, Concise History, 2005, ch. 3; Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 2015, “phyletism” and “Bulgarian Exarchate”). The resulting schism between the Bulgarian Church and the Patriarchate lasted until 1945 (Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 2015). This grave and lasting consequence — and the ecclesiological question at its heart — is the subject of the companion file, treated per METHODOLOGY §4 from both sides (see The Question of Nationalism).

It is enough here to mark that the church struggle Paisiy’s grievance helped to set in motion issued in both a genuine good — a Bulgarian Church — and a genuine wound — a schism founded on a disputed principle. The two came together, and the honest account of the road “toward a Bulgarian Church” must hold both.

See Also

References

  • Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. (The church question as the leading national cause; the escalation of demands; the 1870 firman and the Exarchate; Article 10; the 1872 schism.)
  • MacDermott, Mercia. A History of Bulgaria 1393–1885. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962. (The church struggle in detail; Ilarion of Makariopolis and the 1860 omission of the Patriarch’s name; the 1870 Exarchate.)
  • Detrez, Raymond. Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria. 3rd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. (Entries “Bulgarian Exarchate,” “Ilarion Makariopolski,” “phyletism”: the 1870 firman; the first Exarch; the schism to 1945.)
  • Paisiy Hilendarski. Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska. Zograph Monastery, Mount Athos, 1762. (The grievance against Hellenization and the memory of a Bulgarian church that the later struggle invoked.)
  • Daskalov, Roumen. The Making of a Nation in the Balkans: Historiography of the Bulgarian Revival. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004. (Paisiy’s grievance as the charter of the later church movement.)