Bulgaria

Bulgaria's place in religious history is not principally about Bulgaria. Boris I accepted Christianity in 864 and then did something with longer consequences than the conversion itself: he received the disciples of Cyril and Methodius after they were expelled from Moravia, and gave them the institutional backing to build a Slavonic literary church. The schools at Preslav and Ohrid produced the Cyrillic alphabet, refined the translation of the liturgy and the scriptures into Old Church Slavonic, and made it a third liturgical language of Christendom alongside Greek and Latin. Russia, Serbia, Ukraine and Macedonia inherited that, which is why a decision taken in a ninth century Bulgarian court is legible on a Moscow church wall.

The other durable Bulgarian contribution is heretical. Bogomilism, which appeared here in the tenth century, taught a dualist cosmology in which the visible world is the work of a lesser power, rejected the sacraments and the hierarchy, and spread west along trade routes into the Balkans and eventually into Languedoc, where the connection to Catharism is argued about but not dismissed.

The constitution names Eastern Orthodoxy the traditional religion of Bulgaria without establishing it. Five centuries of Ottoman rule left a Muslim population of roughly a tenth, made up of ethnic Turks and of the Bulgarian speaking Pomaks. The assimilation campaign of the 1980s, which forced Slavic names on them and closed mosques, drove several hundred thousand people to Turkey and is a live memory rather than a historical one.

The Bulgarian Orthodox Church spent twelve years split in two, and the case that ended it became a reference point in European law on how far a state may involve itself in a religious dispute.

The origin was the communist period. Patriarch Maxim had been installed in 1971 with the approval of the state, and after 1989 a group of bishops declared his election uncanonical on that ground and formed an alternative synod. The post communist governments then did the thing that turned an internal argument into a legal one: the state registration authority recognised first one synod and then the other as the legitimate leadership, depending on which party held office, and in 2004 the police were used to evict clergy of the alternative synod from around two hundred and fifty churches and hand the buildings to the recognised body.

The alternative synod took the eviction to the European Court of Human Rights, which found against Bulgaria on the ground that the state had not remained neutral. A state may not resolve a leadership dispute inside a religious community by force, whatever the merits of either side, because the freedom of religion protected by the Convention includes the community's freedom to organise itself.

The schism was formally healed after Maxim's death and the election of a new patriarch, and most of the alternative clergy were received back. What survives is the principle: the judgment is cited across the region whenever a government moves to decide which body is the real church, and the same argument has since been rehearsed in Moldova, North Macedonia, Ukraine and the Baltic states.