Bulgaria: Persecution Begins at Home

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