Bulgarian Orthodox Church

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.

No other Orthodox church has been raised to a patriarchate, reduced, and raised again as many times as Bulgaria's. Knyaz Boris I accepted Christianity in 864 and, more consequentially, gave refuge to the disciples of Cyril and Methodius after their expulsion from Moravia, building the church on Slavonic rather than Greek foundations from the start. That investment paid off within a generation: after Tsar Simeon I's wars against Byzantium ended in a peace treaty, Constantinople recognized Bulgarian autocephaly and raised the church to a Patriarchate in 927, the first Slavic church to hold that rank.

It did not last. The Byzantine reconquest of Bulgaria in 1018 reduced the see to the Archbishopric of Ohrid, autonomous but not patriarchal, and the Ottomans abolished even that in 1767, folding its dioceses into the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. A second attempt fared little better: the Second Bulgarian Empire's church governed itself from 1186, and Constantinople recognized it as the Tarnovo Patriarchate in 1235, only for the Ottoman conquest of Tarnovo in 1393 to end it along with the empire that hosted it.

The modern church's path to its present standing ran through a schism of its own making. An 1870 Ottoman decree created the Bulgarian Exarchate as a distinct millet defined by language rather than by diocese, and the Ecumenical Patriarchate, reading that as an intrusion on its own territorial jurisdiction, declared it schismatic in 1872. The rift outlasted the Ottoman Empire itself and was not lifted until 1945. The Holy Synod restored the Patriarchate on 10 May 1953, a Third Patriarchate in the church's own reckoning, and Constantinople recognized it in 1961. Patriarch Daniil, elected in 2024, marked the restoration's seventy-third anniversary in 2026 by calling the date a measure of "the maturity of the respective local church," a description that fits an institution that has now outlasted three different downfalls.

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.

The Bulgarian Orthodox Church governs itself from Saint Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Sofia, where Patriarch Daniil, elected in 2024 and titled Metropolitan of Sofia, presides over a Holy Synod of diocesan bishops. Thirteen dioceses cover Bulgaria itself, with two further dioceses serving diaspora communities across Western and Central Europe, the Americas and Australia, roughly 2,600 parishes in total. Services are conducted in Church Slavonic, the liturgical language the church's ninth century founders built from Cyril and Methodius's translation work, alongside a growing modern Bulgarian vernacular.

The most visible fault line in the church today is not doctrinal but calendrical. In 1968 the Holy Synod adopted the Revised Julian calendar for fixed feasts, realigning them with the Gregorian dates most of Europe already used, while keeping the traditional Julian paschalion for Easter and its dependent moveable feasts, the same split most other Eastern Orthodox churches follow. A minority read the change as, in their own words, "a betrayal of Orthodox tradition and an unwarranted compromise with modernism," and broke away as the Old Calendar Orthodox Church of Bulgaria, a small body that today holds eighteen church buildings and two monasteries and keeps New Year on 14 January. Bulgaria's Supreme Court formally registered that body on 16 December 2024, a decision Patriarch Daniil called uncanonical, on the ground that "the Orthodox Church can only be one."

On membership the church's own count and outside survey research diverge in scope rather than in kind. Pew Research's 2017 report on Orthodox Christianity found 81 percent of Bulgaria's population, more than six million people on 2015 figures, self-identifying as Orthodox Christian; the church's own figure of 7 to 8 million folds in the diaspora eparchies that a national survey of Bulgaria alone could never count.