Russia and the Bulgarian national-church question

1856-1864

Abstract

The struggle for national recognition through an independent Bulgarian church is one of the most vivid and massive manifestations of our national liberation revolution. Beginning as an organized movement in the 1840s, after the Crimean War (1853-1856) it reached a scale that placed it at the center of Bulgarian social, political, cultural and spiritual life. At the same time, it went beyond an internal conflict for the Orthodox community in the Ottoman Empire and permanently entered the sphere of attention of both the Turkish government and the great powers. The Bulgarian-Greek ecclesiastical-national dispute became another arena of their long-standing rivalry for influence in the Ottoman dominions, becoming, in the words of G. С. Rakovsky's "little eastern
ny question". And while for the Western states it proved to be a favourable occasion for undermining Russian prestige, for Russia it created great complications
tions and difficulties for Russia, because it affects some basic principles of its policy. Her conception of projecting her political influence in the Ottoman Empire by patronizing Orthodoxy, by maintaining its cohesion and unity in the face of the old Orthodox ecclesiastical centers, and especially of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, was put to the test.
Traditionally and actively engaged with the situation of the Orthodox community under Muslim rule, Russian diplomacy has not remained indifferent to the acute conflict that has arisen within it. From the mid-1840s, when the Bulgarian ecclesiastical question was raised and long after it received its solution through the Sultan's ferman of 1870, Russia did not cease to take an interest in Bulgarian-Greek relations. Relying also on her right, recognized by Turkey, as the patron of the enslaved Orthodox peoples, and on her old ties with the Patriarchate of Constantinople, she interfered in these relations, seeking to regulate them in favour of her great state-political aims in the East.