THE DEVELOPMENTS UP TO 1872
Uniate propaganda had grown steadily in the 1850s, encouraged in part by Polish refugees in Constantinople and in part by the French and Sardinian successes in the Crimean war, and also by the support of Dragan Tsankov, and influential Bulgarian activist and Ottoman civil servant.
In 1860 a group of Bulgarians in Constantinople signed an act of union with Rome, and nominated as their leader an illiterate octogenarian, Josef Sokolski, who was soon to be personally invested with his new office by Pope Pius IX in Rome.
It did not last. Within a few months Sokolski had reneged on his flock reverting to Orthodoxy and taking shi at dead of night for Odessa. By June 1861 there was no-one in Constantinople who would perform the Bulgarian Uniate services, a situation not remedied until 1863 when Raphael Popov was appointed to the vacancy. He was thirty-five years of age.
The Uniate option was in later decades to be chosen by some Bulgarian communities in Macedonia but after 1861 it was a 'non possumus' in Constantinople.
The Sokolski fiasco forced the former advocates of Uniatism back to the conclusion that they had to find some form of compromise between the Bulgarians and the patriarchate.
After years of hopeless debate a breakthrough came in 1867 when Patriarch Gregory IV offered the Bulgarians an autonomous church within the Patriarchate; the church would be headed by an exarch, and ecclesiastic rank between that of archbishop and patriarch. For the first time the patriarch had recognised the Bulgarian's right to a church of their own and the settlement would have found favour with them but for its territorial provisions.
The 1867 proposal confined the Bulgarian exarchate to the area north of the Balkans, and made no mention of where the exarch would have his headquarters. This was an issue of cardinal importance because if the exarch were confined to the area north of the Balkans he and his church would have no influence amongst the Bulgarians of Macedonia and Thrace. The plan was rejected by the Bulgarians. It seemed like a return to square one.
The situation had however changed, primarily because of external developments which alarmed the Porte.
The rights of the new Bulgarian church, the exarchate, were not unlimited. Its liturgy still had to mention the patriarch, to whom it had to defer in matters of doctrine, and whose right to procure Holy Oil it had to respect.
The territorial division was also of great importance. In 1868 Gavril Krustevich, a prominent Constantinople Bulgarian who worked in the Ottoman civil service, had submitted a plan for the division of the dioceses between the two churches. According to his scheme the exarchate would take twenty-five of them whilst the rest would remain within the patriarchate. The Bulgarian dioceses were generally to be larger that the patriarchist and were to cover almost all of Macedonia.
Though Krustevich's scheme was used as the basis for the divisions contained in the 1870 firman the Bulgarian share had by that time been reduced to fifteen, namely Ruse, Silistra, Shumen, Turnovo, Sofia, Vratsa, Lovech, Vidin, Nish, Pirot, Kiustendil, Samokov, Veles, Varna and Plovdiv, although the latter two cities (the Virgin Mary quarter of Plovdiv excepted) were to remain within the patriarchate.
Of the remaining fifty-nine dioceses fifty-one were to stay in the patriarchate and eight to be divided.
The 1870 settlement provided that a diocese should be allowed to transfer to the exarchate if two-thirds of its population voted in favour to such a move, but it said nothing on the question of where the exarch was to reside and have his headquarters.
The Bulgarians, not for the last time in their modern history, could not rejoice over the territorial terms of a major settlement.
The 1870 declaration was ejected by the patriarch. Impasse had returned and it was to remain until 1872. In that year the patriarch called a patriarchic assembly to condemn the Bulgarians.
In response the latter set choosing an exarch, the choice falling on Bishop Antim of Vidin who was to reside in Constantinople. On 23 May 1872 he celebrated the liturgy in St Stephen's and then read a long proclamation of the independence of the Bulgarian church.
In September the patriarch proclaimed a schism. The exarchate was condemned for the sin of phyletism, that is maintaining that ecclesiastic jurisdiction is determined not territorially but ethnically; the kernel of the problem was the seat of exarchate because canon law contained the principle of there being only one prelate in any city.
In the struggle for the establishment of a separate Bulgarian church the modern Bulgarian nation had been created. The process had begun when, in conformity with the then largely unknown injunction of Paiisi, Bulgarians began to know their own nation and to study their tongue. They had since then developed a nation-wide intelligentsia, and they had pitted themselves against the Greek-dominated clerical hierarchy.
The exarchate could now represent the interests of the Bulgarian nation in the Ottoman corridors of power; more importantly, it could defend Bulgarian Orthodoxy against the patriarchate and against Uniatism in Macedonia, and sponsor Bulgarian churches and schools in the mixed dioceses and even in some which were still in the patriarchate.
Yet as the cultural revival moved towards its culmination in the 1870 there was already a small body of Bulgarian activists for whom the political struggle had already become supreme. For them the goal was not simply the creation of a Bulgarian cultural nation represented in its church. Their aspirations were towards a political nation represented by its own political institutions within its own political borders.