The Bulgarian Patriarchate pleads for the persecuted
church abroad. It petitioned the state to liquidate the Old Calendar Orthodox
Church of Bulgaria at home.
July 2, 2026
Hold two documented facts side by
side.
In August 2024, the Patriarch of
the Bulgarian Orthodox Church received the ambassador of the United States and
drew his attention to the plight of the church in Ukraine — the restrictions on
its pastoral work, the "discriminatory policy" to which it is
subjected — and urged, in the Patriarchate's own published account of the
meeting, that democratic forces around the world help ensure religious
freedom in Ukraine and elsewhere. [1]
In late 2025, the courts of
Bulgaria ruled with finality that the Old Calendar Orthodox Church of Bulgaria
— a community of Orthodox Christians with roots in that country running back to
1968, with its parishes, its monastery of nuns, its cathedral in Sofia — must
be stripped of the legal registration it had held for less than a year, under a
law enacted for that purpose at the request of the Bulgarian Patriarchate
itself. [2]
The distance between those two
facts is the subject of this editorial. The word doing the heaviest work in the
first of them is elsewhere. This is an investigation into where,
precisely, elsewhere ends — and, as always in this journal,
every exhibit below is stamped by the institutions themselves: the
Patriarchate's own communiqués, the National Assembly's own votes, the courts'
own judgments, and the European Court of Human Rights' own findings. The
prosecution's exhibits are all stamped by the defendant.
Exhibit A: The voice abroad
No Orthodox primate in the world
jurisdictions has spoken more insistently about the persecution of the church
in Ukraine than the current Bulgarian Patriarch. The record is extensive and
entirely self-published or friendly-sourced.
He has stated publicly that the
Ukrainian legislation against the church there imposes "serious factual
and legal restrictions" on its pastoral activity and amounts to a
"discriminatory policy." [3] In a national television interview
marking the first anniversary of his enthronement, he declared that when
violence occurs, when churches are seized, and when priests suffer, this
cannot be ignored. [4] He raised the matter personally with the American
ambassador, asking the world's democratic forces to safeguard religious
freedom. [5] He has received, honored, and prayed with a delegation of the most
heavily persecuted hierarchs of the Ukrainian church. [6] He has opposed
European sanctions against the head of the Russian church. [7] And the Moscow
Patriarch, in a published letter of congratulation, thanked him by name for
"supporting the persecuted Ukrainian Orthodox Church" and for every
word spoken in defense of his suffering brothers. [8]
Set down, then, the working
definition of persecution that emerges from the Patriarchate's own advocacy,
because we will need it shortly: legal restrictions on a church's
activity; discriminatory policy; state interference in the life of a religious
community; the use of courts and legislation against believers. These
are the Patriarchate's criteria, published under its own letterhead. Remember
them.
Exhibit B: The Old Calendar
Orthodox Church of Bulgaria
Who, exactly, is the body being
erased? Not a foreign import, not a recent invention, and not — as will be seen
— a claimant to anyone's property. The Old Calendar Orthodox Church of Bulgaria
is the continuation, in unbroken succession, of the Bulgarian faithful who
refused the calendar reform of 1968.
In December 1968, the Bulgarian
Patriarchate — then under the close management of a communist state — adopted
the new calendar. A small circle of clergy and faithful refused: the spiritual
children of Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev), the Russian hierarch who had lived
in Sofia for thirty years and whose defense of Orthodoxy against ecumenism had
made him, in the words of those who knew him, the conscience of the Church. For
their refusal, the dissenting archimandrites were banned from serving and
expelled from the Theological Academy; the convent at Knyazhevo had its church
expropriated; the Patriarch of that era announced in synod that those who did
not accept the reform would be unfrocked or confined to a ruined mountain
monastery; and the community passed into a catacomb existence under a regime
whose militia watched the convent gates. [9] They ceased commemorating the
Bulgarian Patriarch in 1983, received a bishop in 1993 through the Old Calendar
hierarchies of Greece and Romania, and applied — that same year — for legal
registration in the new, democratic Bulgaria.
The application received no
reply. Not a refusal: no reply at all. [10]
By 2013 the Old Calendar Church
of Bulgaria numbered some two thousand faithful with twenty-four priests; today
it counts parishes across the country, a convent of some sixty nuns, and a
cathedral in Sofia. [11] It has never claimed a single church building, bank
account, or asset of the Patriarchate; the European Court would later record
expressly that it laid no claim to them. [12] It asked for one thing only:
legal existence. Without registration, a religious community in Bulgaria cannot
own its places of worship, receive donations, or lawfully employ its own
clergy. [13] For thirty years, that is what was withheld from the Bulgarian Old
Calendarists.
Let this journal's own position
be stated without hedging, because it is the position of the whole
Patristic-calendar witness of which the Bulgarian church is a part. The Old
Calendar Orthodox Church of Bulgaria is not a curiosity, not a sect, and not — whatever
the statute now says — a counterfeit. It is the confessing remnant of Bulgarian
Orthodoxy: the portion of that church which, when the reform of 1968 was
imposed by a synod under a politburo's supervision, did what the confessors of
every century have done, and paid what they have always paid. Three generations
of the same community have now confessed under three regimes — the catacombs
under communism, legal non-existence under democracy, and liquidation under the
current synod — and the faith confessed has not varied by a syllable. That is
not the profile of a fraud. It is the profile of the thing frauds imitate.
Exhibit C: What the record
shows happened at home
Follow the file.
2012. The Sofia City
Court refuses to register the Old Calendar Church, reasoning that its name is
"identical" to that of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. In those very
proceedings, the state's Religious Denominations Directorate declines to submit
its own opinion until it has obtained the opinion of the Holy Synod of the
Bulgarian Orthodox Church. [14] Pause on that: the question of whether the Old
Calendarists may legally exist was referred, by an organ of the state, to the
very institution from which they had separated. The rival was invited to judge.
2021. The European
Court of Human Rights, in Bulgarian Orthodox Old Calendar Church and
Others v. Bulgaria, finds a violation of Article 9 of the Convention read
in the light of Article 11. Its language is not equivocal: pluralism, "the
basic fabric of democracy," is incompatible with state action compelling a
religious community to unite under a single leadership; in a democratic society
the state has no need to ensure that religious communities remain under one
authority; the refusal to register was "not necessary in a democratic
society." [15]
December 2024. Executing
that judgment, Bulgaria's Supreme Court of Cassation orders the church
registered. For a few days, after fifty-six years, the Old Calendar Orthodox
Church of Bulgaria legally exists.
The response. The
Patriarch personally describes the registration as "uncanonical." The
Holy Synod publishes a statement calling the judgment "as unexpected as it
is unfortunate, with serious consequences for the future," declaring that
"the Orthodox Church can only be one," and demanding that the Old
Calendar Church either renounce the name Orthodox or accept that it is "an
inseparable part" of the Patriarchate. [16] The Patriarch and members of
the Synod then hold meetings with the country's political leadership — in the
words of a publication wholly sympathetic to the Patriarchate, seeking
state protection, and securing agreement that legislation would prohibit
any body but the Patriarchate from bearing the word "Orthodox." [17] After
meeting the Patriarch, the leader of the largest parliamentary party announces
his support for the Patriarchate as "the sole expression of Orthodoxy in
Bulgaria." [18]
January 31, 2025. The
National Assembly amends the Religious Denominations Act by a vote of 186 to 1.
The Bulgarian Orthodox Church is declared the sole representative of Eastern
Orthodoxy in Bulgaria; no other denomination may register under the word
"Orthodox" or its derivatives; registered bodies that do not change
their names within two months are to be terminated, with liquidation and
deletion from the register to follow. [19] The single dissenting deputy states
the constitutional objection on the floor: "It is important that we are
here as a National Assembly, not as the Holy Synod... the church and the state
are separated" — and warns that closed cases with final judgments will be
reopened by force of law. [20] A media outlet devoted to the Patriarchate's
cause reports the same fact as a triumph: this is "the first case in
Bulgarian legislation where reference to Church canonical law would be
explicitly included in a legal text with binding force." [21]
2025. The Sofia City
Prosecution Office and the Religious Denominations Directorate move to
terminate the Old Calendar Church's registration and open liquidation
proceedings. When the Sofia City Court initially refuses — holding that the
amendments conflict with the European Convention — the prosecution appeals.
[22] In the autumn, the courts characterize the Old Calendarists as outside the
law; by December, the ruling is final: the Old Calendar Orthodox Church of
Bulgaria is to be deregistered. [23]
Fifty-six years without legal
existence. Eleven months with it.
Now apply the Patriarchate's
own definition
Return to the criteria the
Patriarchate published in its advocacy for the church in Ukraine, and run the
checklist against the file above.
Legal restrictions on a
church's pastoral activity? For three decades the Old Calendar Church
of Bulgaria could not own its churches, receive donations, or employ its clergy
— a condition the European Court examined and condemned. [24]
Discriminatory policy? The
Old Calendarists argued before the European Court that Bulgarian courts refused
registration only to communities resembling the Patriarchate while freely
registering multiple Evangelical and Baptist churches of a single confession;
the Court found the underlying refusal unjustified in a democratic society.
[25]
State interference in the life
of a religious community? A statute now in force names one church the
sole lawful bearer of the word "Orthodox," writes canonical claims
into binding civil law for the first time in the country's legislative history,
and prescribes liquidation for the Old Calendar Church if it will not surrender
its name.
Courts and legislation used
against believers? A final judgment of a national supreme court,
issued in execution of a European human-rights ruling, was overturned within
weeks by an act of parliament passed 186 to 1 — precisely the reopening of
closed cases by force of law that the lone dissenting deputy warned against.
Every criterion the Patriarchate
applies to Kyiv is met, item for item, in Sofia — and the body it is met
against is the Old Calendar Orthodox Church of Bulgaria. There is exactly one
difference, and it is not a difference of kind. In Ukraine, the state moved
against a church over the objection of the local patriarchate's sympathizers.
In Bulgaria, the state moved against the Old Calendar Church at the
request of the local patriarchate — after its primate called that
church's legal existence "uncanonical," after its synod sought what
its own friendly press called state protection, and after its meetings with
party leaders produced the very bill. The Patriarchate of Bulgaria is not a
bystander to the checklist. It is the petitioner.
And so the sentence delivered to
the American ambassador completes itself. Religious freedom must be
ensured in Ukraine and elsewhere — and elsewhere,
on the evidence of the file, extends to every jurisdiction on earth except the
streets around the Synod's own palace.
The saint in the middle of it
There is one more exhibit, and it
is the most uncomfortable of all, because the Patriarchate itself placed it in
the record.
In 2016, Archbishop Seraphim
(Sobolev) — the hierarch whose spiritual children founded the Bulgarian Old
Calendar movement, the man who taught them that ecumenism was a betrayal of
Orthodoxy and whose counsel they invoked when they refused the reform of 1968 —
was glorified as a saint, with the participation and celebration of the
Bulgarian Patriarchate, which venerates his relics in Sofia to this day and
marked the tenth anniversary of his canonization with a solemn liturgy. [26]
Sit with the arithmetic of that.
The father is on the calendar of saints. The children are on the liquidation
docket. The same institution that censes the relics of St. Seraphim of Sofia
petitioned the state to dissolve the Old Calendar Orthodox Church of Bulgaria —
the church that did what he taught. If the saint was right — and the
Patriarchate's own act of glorification declares that he was — then the church
formed in his obedience is not a fraud upon Orthodoxy but its remnant. And if
that church is, as the Synod's statement insists, no church at all, then what,
precisely, was canonized in 2016?
This journal does not leave its
own answer in doubt. What was glorified in 2016 was the father of the Bulgarian
confessors; what stands before the liquidator in 2025 is his church — the one
body in Bulgaria that received his teaching whole and kept it at cost. The
Patriarchate cannot have the saint and the statute. It has chosen to keep both,
and the incoherence is now enshrined in Bulgarian law. The Old Calendarists,
for their part, have no incoherence to manage: they venerate the same saint the
Patriarchate venerates, and unlike the Patriarchate, they obeyed him.
What this journal is not
saying
Let the record be precise about
what is not claimed here. This editorial does not adjudicate
the situation in Ukraine, does not defend any state's measures against any
believer anywhere, and does not require the reader to take a side in that
conflict. It stipulates, for the sake of argument, everything the Bulgarian
Patriarchate says about the suffering of the church there — every word of it.
The argument does not depend on doubting the Patriarchate's advocacy. It
depends on believing it.
Because if legal restriction,
discrimination, state interference, and legislative targeting constitute
persecution when they fall upon two hundred monasteries in Ukraine, then they
constitute persecution when they fall upon one convent of sixty nuns in Bulgaria.
The number of the persecuted does not alter the nature of the act. A synod that
can identify the pattern flawlessly at a thousand kilometers' distance, and
then reproduce the pattern at home down to the statutory mechanics — courts,
registries, liquidation procedures — has not failed to understand what
persecution is. It has demonstrated that it understands perfectly.
This journal has documented
elsewhere how the Bulgarian Synod, alone with Georgia, drew the honest
conclusion from its own confession and left the World Council of Churches — and
how it refused Crete. [27] Credit was given where due, and it stands. But the
same synod's conduct in this file discloses what that traditionalism is
prepared to do when the Patristic-calendar witness appears not in a rival
patriarchate's territory but in its own: it reaches for the state. The
confessors of 1968 were handed to the militia by a patriarchate that answered
to a politburo. Their successors have been handed to the liquidator by a
patriarchate that answered to no one but itself — and that, in the same twelve
months, asked the ambassadors of the world to weep with it over churches seized
by governments.
When violence occurs, when
churches are seized, and when priests suffer — this cannot be ignored. The
sentence is true. The Patriarchate said it. The only question this editorial
leaves with the reader is the one the file forces: whether the sentence was a
confession of faith, or a description of policy — and whether elsewhere was
ever meant to include the Old Calendar Orthodox Church of Bulgaria, the people
who kept the calendar the saints kept, in the country where their saint now
lies enshrined.
What a court cannot deregister
One word remains, and it belongs
to the Old Calendarists rather than to their prosecutors.
A court can strike a name from a
register. It struck this one after eleven months, and the men who drafted the
statute may count that a victory. But the Old Calendar Orthodox Church of
Bulgaria was not created by registration and cannot be dissolved by its
removal. She existed for fifty-six years without the state's permission —
through the militia at the convent gates, through the decades when her
application sat unanswered in a drawer, through every refusal the European
Court would later condemn — and her liturgies did not pause for any of it. The
nuns of that convent will rise for the midnight office on the day the
liquidation order is stamped, as they rose the day before it, on the calendar
of the saints, in the obedience of their saint. What the National Assembly
voted 186 to 1 to protect was a name in a civil register. What it could not
reach by any vote is the thing the name pointed to.
The confessors of 1968 were
promised unfrocking and a ruined monastery in the mountains. They took the
mountains. Their heirs are promised liquidation. The record of this file
suggests they have already shown, across three regimes and fifty-eight years, exactly
what they will do with a promise like that — and the record of the Church
suggests that this, and not the statute, is what Bulgaria will one day keep.
✦
Notes
1. Communiqué of the Bulgarian
Patriarchate on the meeting between the Bulgarian Patriarch and the U.S.
Ambassador to Bulgaria, August 2024; reported in "Bulgarian Patriarch
informs U.S. ambassador about persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church,"
OrthoChristian, August 2024.
2. "Съдът реши окончателно:
'Българска православна старостилна църква' трябва да бъде дерегистрирана"
[The court rules with finality: the "Bulgarian Orthodox Old Calendar
Church" must be deregistered], Glasove, December 2025; cf. "Βουλγαρία:
Δικαστήριο χαρακτηρίζει έκνομους τους Βούλγαρους Παλαιοημερολογίτες"
[Bulgaria: Court characterizes the Bulgarian Old Calendarists as outside the
law], Balkan Periscope, 10 October 2025.
3. Statements of the Bulgarian
Patriarch on Ukraine's Law 8371, August 2024; see Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty, "Pro-War Policies Put Russia's Orthodox Church Under Increasing
Pressure Outside Russia," 30 August 2024, quoting the characterizations
"serious factual and legal restrictions" and "discriminatory
policy."
4. Interview of the Bulgarian
Patriarch with Bulgarian National Television on the first anniversary of his
enthronement, mid-2025; reported by Orthodox Times and RISU, July 2025.
5. See n. 1.
6. "Persecuted Metropolitan
Longin visits staunch Bulgarian Patriarch Daniil," OrthoChristian,
February 2026, describing the visit of a delegation of hierarchs of the
Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
7. Remarks of the Bulgarian
Patriarch following the session of the Holy Synod, June 2026; Orthodox Times,
"Bulgarian Patriarch defends opposition to sanctions on Russian Patriarch
Kirill."
8. Letter of congratulation of
the Moscow Patriarch to the Bulgarian Patriarch on the anniversary of his
ministry, 2025; quoted in RISU, "Bulgarian Patriarch voices Russian
narratives while commenting on events in Ukraine," July 2025.
9. On the events of 1968–1990:
"Bishop Photios of Triaditsa and the Old Calendarist Church of
Bulgaria," Orthodox America (archival); the community's
own historical account; and the factual recitation in the European Court's
judgment cited at n. 15, §§ 4–5.
10. Bulgarian Orthodox Old
Calendar Church and Others v. Bulgaria, no. 56751/13, ECtHR, 20 April 2021,
§ 6 (application of 1993 "remained without a formal reply").
11. Ibid., § 7 (twenty-four
priests, about two thousand adherents by 2013); on the present count of
parishes, the convent, and the Sofia cathedral, see the community's own
published directories and contemporaneous Bulgarian reporting, 2024–2025.
12. Ibid., §§ 14–15 and the
Court's summary of the applicants' submissions on paragraph 3 of the 2002 Act's
transitional provisions.
13. Ibid., § 7 and the Court's
account of the consequences of non-registration.
14. Ibid., §§ 10–11: the
Religious Denominations Directorate advised the court that it would file its
comments only after obtaining the opinion of the Holy Synod of the Bulgarian
Orthodox Church.
15. Ibid., §§ 62–64:
"Pluralism, which is the basic fabric of democracy, is incompatible with
State action compelling a religious community to unite under a single
leadership"; the refusal was "not 'necessary in a democratic
society'"; breach of Article 9 read in the light of Article 11.
16. Statement of the Holy Synod
of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church – Bulgarian Patriarchate, late December 2024;
reported by the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency, "Bulgarian Orthodox Church
Slams Supreme Court Judgment on Old Calendar Orthodox Church Registration,"
30 December 2024, including the Patriarch's prior public characterization of
the registration as "uncanonical."
17. "Bulgarian Parliament
moves to protect Patriarchate's legal status against registration of
schismatics," OrthoChristian, January 2025: the Patriarch "and
members of the Holy Synod met with various institutions seeking state
protection against a potential new schism, agreeing on the need to prohibit the
use of the word 'Orthodox' as a designation for any church in Bulgaria other
than the Patriarchate."
18. Contemporaneous Bulgarian
reporting on the meeting between the Patriarch and the leader of GERB, December
2024 ("the sole expression of Orthodoxy in Bulgaria"); see also the
Wikipedia digest of party positions with underlying Bulgarian sources.
19. Law on Amendments and
Supplements to the Religious Denominations Act, adopted 31 January 2025, in
force 4 February 2025; The Sofia Globe, "National Assembly legislates that
Bulgarian Orthodox Church is country's sole representative of Eastern Orthodoxy,"
31 January 2025 (vote of 186–1); OrthoChristian, "Only Bulgarian
Patriarchate can use 'Orthodox' in its name," February 2025 (two-month
renaming deadline; termination and liquidation procedure).
20. Remarks of the deputy from We
Continue the Change – Democratic Bulgaria on the floor of the National
Assembly, 31 January 2025; The Sofia Globe, ibid.
21. OrthoChristian,
"Bulgarian Parliament moves to protect Patriarchate's legal status against
registration of schismatics," January 2025.
22. Bulgarian Telegraph Agency,
"Prosecutors Appeal Court's Refusal to Cancel Registration of Old Calendar
Orthodox Church of Bulgaria," July 2025, including the motions of the
Sofia City Prosecution Office and the Religious Denominations Directorate to
terminate the registration and initiate liquidation.
23. See n. 2.
24. See nn. 10, 13, 15.
25. Bulgarian Orthodox Old
Calendar Church and Others v. Bulgaria, §§ 65–66 (the Article 14 complaint)
and §§ 62–64 (the Court's holding on Article 9).
26. On the glorification of St.
Seraphim (Sobolev) of Boguchar, February 2016, and the Bulgarian Patriarchate's
celebration of its tenth anniversary at the church housing his relics in Sofia,
see OrthoChristian, "10th anniversary of canonization of St. Seraphim
(Sobolev), link between Russian and Bulgarian Churches," February 2026.
27. "But We
Don't," Patristic Witness (2026), n. 1 and the discussion
of the withdrawals of Georgia (1997) and Bulgaria (1998) from the World Council
of Churches.
Source: https://patristicwitness.com/ArticleDetail?id=6a4778978db63aa061b0f4d1
