The Bulgarian Church Question and Nation – Building in the Balkan Peninsula 1870–1878

Radosavljević, Jelena N. (2020) The Bulgarian Church Question and Nation – Building in the Balkan Peninsula 1870–1878. In: War, Peace and Nation-Building (1853–1918). Institute of History; Sapienza University of Rome, Research center CEMAS, Belgrade; Roma, pp. 161-175. ISBN 978-86-7743-140-2

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Abstract

The paper examines the Bulgarian church question opened in the early second half of the 19th century, in the context of creation of modern nations in the Balkans. Being one of the most numerous peoples in the European part of the Ottoman Empire, the Bulgarians began the struggle for cultural and literary revival. Due to misunderstandings with the Ecumenical Patriarchate, that struggle grew into the movement for the establishment of an autocephalous church. The formation of the Bulgarian Exarchate in 1870 impacted on relations between Bulgarians and the neighbouring Orthodox peoples. This also affected the relations between the Serbs and Bulgarians, between whom there was a wide zone of transitional dialects, where the national determination of the population was still not entirely defined. To illustrate this, we analysed the situation in the Niš, Nišava and Skopje eparchies from the establishment of the Bulgarian Exarchate until the Congress of Berlin in 1878, when state borders between the Principality of Serbia and the Principality of Bulgaria were defined

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