bulmodexa1

THE DEVELOPMENTS UP TO 1848

In the early eighteenth century most branches of civil administration in the Ottoman empire were dominated by the Phanariot Greeks.

Nowhere was this more true than in the Orthodox Church.

The growing power and influence of the Greeks which had distressed Paiisi <author in the 1760s of a ‘Slavonic-Bulgarian History’, viewed as the seminal work in Bulgarian national revival> continued throughout the century.

In 1766 the Serbian patriarchate at Pec was dissolved <since the 1699 Serb migrations to escape Ottoman control the centre of Serb spiritual life had shifted in the Vojvodina> and in the following year the same fate befell the Bulgarian patriarchate in Ohrid.

Church appointments at the higher levels had long been a virtual Greek monopoly but in the later eighteenth century there were numerous cases of Greek-speaking priests being nominated even for Bulgarian parishes.

It was not that the presence of Greek clerics or prelates necessarily provoked resentment or tension, and relation s between Greek and Bulgarian were not necessarily hostile. Greek bishops mediated successfully between disputing Bulgarian guilds, and if the Greek ecclesiastic authorities were suspicious of teaching in Bulgarian they were equally set against teaching in demotic Greek.

Aprilov himself <Vasil, founder of the first lay school teaching Bulgarian, in Gabrovo, 1834> believed that Bulgarian should be taught not in place of but in addition to liturgical Greek, and both he and the first teacher at the Gabrovo school, Neofit Rilski, remained faithful members of the Greek patriarchate.

It is undoubtedly the case that in the first half of the nineteenth century, Paisii’s latent message notwithstanding, many Bulgarians who regarded themselves as cultured or educated preferred to speak Greek, believing this to be the mark of the enlightened person; and given the philhellenic hysteria in western Europe and the United States this was hardly surprising. But Greek also had its advantages in the Balkans as a widespread medium of commerce, and many guilds and trading concerns continued to use it and even keep their records in it into the second half of the nineteenth century.

It was not until the 1850s that mounting disagreements over educational and religious issues forced the powerful Plovdiv guild of aba makers to split into separate Greek and Bulgarian sections. <aba: a coarse-grained cloth>

The main area of friction between Greek and Bulgarian was the church. Originally this was because the Greek dominated church was also widely corrupt.

The practice of selling office and the percolation down of corruption which this gad engendered were still very much in evidence at the end of the 'kurdjaliistvo' <a period of virtual breakdown in central government in the Balkans starting in the 1770s up to 1820: Ali Pasha, Osman Pasvantoglou, etc>.

In the 1820s many Bulgarian villages were paying to the church twice that which they were required to hand over in state taxes.

As early as 1784 a Serb, Gerasim Zelic, had argued the need for Slav rather than Greek clerics, but it was not until the 1820s that action was taken in this regard.

In 1820 the inhabitants of Vratsa refused to hand over their church taxes on the grounds that the local bishop, Metodi, was incorrigibly corrupt. There were few who would have disputed this contention but neither the Porte <Central government> nor the patriarchate could tolerate such insubordination and the leaders of the Vratsa protest, most of them local merchants, were sentenced to long terms in exile by the Ottoman authorities. In 1825 a similar protest against the Greek bishop of Skopje was equally unsuccessful.

In the 1830s the nature of this incipient conflict began to change. A growing number of Bulgarian priests were being educated in Russia and their Slav consciousness was greater than those who had remained in the hellenist world of the Orthodox seminaries in the Balkans. When the see of Turnovo fell vacant in 1835 there was a concerted move to secure the nomination of a Bulgarian-speaking bishop. The move failed. Although it was supported by the Porte, it was opposed by the patriarchate.

In 1839 the former issued the Hatt-I-Sherif, a declaration of intent which promised religious equality between Muslims and Christians; many Bulgarians chose to interpret it as also promising equality between themselves and the Greeks.

In the 1840s the Bulgarians' protest became quite clearly one not against Greek bishops because they were corrupt, it was against Greek bishops because they were Greek.

In 1841 there was an outburst of social unrest focused on Nish in the northwest of the Bulgarian lands; the demands produced by the rebels included one for 'bishops who at least can understand our language'.

By the end of that decade there had been protests against Greek bishops in Ruse, Ohrid, Lovech, Sofia, Samokov, Vidin, Turnovo, Leskovats, Svishtov, Vratsa, Truavna, and Plovdiv.

The patriarchate refused to heed any of these demands, and it was increasing frustration at the obduracy of the church's rulers that forced Bulgarian communities into demanding the right to administer their own churches and appoint their own clergy.

The movement was lead by Neofit Bozveli <pupil of Sofroni Vrachenski (of Vratsa), first promoter of Paisi's History mentioned earlier> and Ilarion Makariopolski, first in Turnovo and then in Constantinople. Initially they made little progress and both leaders were incarcerated, Neofit eventually dying in prison, but in 1849 came the first real breakthrough when the Porte agreed that the Bulgarians should be allowed to build a church in the Ottoman capital on land donated by Stephan Bogoridi, a wealthy local Bulgarian who had risen high in the Ottoman civil service and was a nephew of Sofroni Vrachenski. The church, St Stepen's, was dedicated the following year and was to become the focal point of Bulgarian cultural and political activity for the next two and a half decades. The original church was replaced in 1890 by a building which is still to be seen in the Balat district of Istanbul, and which remains the cause of intermittent wrangles between the patriarchate and Bulgarian ecclesiastics.

The church established in 1848 was to be subject to the patriarchate in matters of dogma and ecclesiastic jurisdiction, and it was still to be part of the Orthodox millet whose head was the patriarch, still represented the Orthodox community in its relations with the Ottoman authorities. The church, however, was to be the property of the Bulgarian people, was to conduct its services in Bulgarian, and was to be administered by a twenty-strong government which could appoint priests for the church. This governing council was the first new and specifically Bulgarian organisation to receive official recognition in the Ottoman empire since 1393.