Bulgarian Exarchate - Struggle For Autonomy

Struggle For Autonomy

The result of the work of Paisius and his followers began before long to give fruit. Discontent with the supremacy of the Greek clergy started to flare up in several Bulgarian dioceses as early as the 1820s.

It was not, however, until the 1850 that the Bulgarians initiated a purposeful struggle against the Greek clerics in a number of bishoprics demanding their replacement with Bulgarian ones as well as other changes such as the use of Church-Slavonic in liturgy and fixed salaries for bishops. By that time, most Bulgarian religious leaders had realised that any further struggle for the rights of the Bulgarians in the Ottoman Empire could not succeed unless they managed to obtain at least some degree of autonomy from the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

As the Ottomans identified nationality (ethnicity) with confession and the Bulgarians were Orthodox Christians, they were automatically included in the Rūm millet, a community ruled immediately by the Ecumenical Patriarch in his capacity of millet-bashi and dominated by Phanar Greeks (Phanariots). Thus, if the Bulgarians wanted to have Bulgarian schools and liturgy in Bulgarian, they needed an independent ecclesiastical organisation.

The struggle between the Bulgarians, led by Neofit Bozveli and Ilarion Stoyanov, and the Phanariotes intensified throughout the 1860s. As the Greek clerics were ousted from most Bulgarian bishoprics at the end of the decade, the whole of northern Bulgaria, as well as the northern parts of Thrace and Macedonia had, to all intents and purposes, seceded from the Patriarchate.