BULGARIAN-SPEAKING MUSLIMS - Lalev

accepted Islam. 5 When communities in Bulgaria converted, they often continued to speak their
mother tongue, thus becoming a group of their own. According to J.R. Crampton, this is how the
Bulgarian-speaking Muslims, or Pomaks, appeared. 6
Even though conversion to Islam in Bulgaria and throughout the Balkans was largely
voluntary, religious tension abounded in the Ottoman Empire. Strife often occurred among Balkan
co-religionists. Indeed, the Bulgarian national revival arose, in large part, as a response to
confrontations during the 1830s and 1840s with the Greek Orthodox Church and religious
dominance. The emerging Bulgarian intellectual and economic elite in the nineteenth century felt so
utterly controlled by the Greek Patriarchate that in 1860 they pushed for declaration of ecclesiastical
independence. It was this protracted struggle for religio-cultural autonomy from the Orthodox
Greeks, J.R. Crampton contends, that “turned a number of powerful and influential Bulgarians in the
direction of a political struggle aimed at the creation of independent nation-state” 7 by the later
nineteenth century.
After the unilateral secession from the Orthodox Patriarchate in 1860, the next vital step for
the Bulgarians was to obtain Ottoman recognition of a separate Church. This effort, however, was
fraught with frustration as the Ottoman government, confronting fierce opposition from the
Orthodox Patriarchate in Constantinople which refused to accept the de facto separation, delayed a
decision. Ultimately, Crampton argues, this difficult fight for religious independence helped define
the emerging sense of Bulgarian nationalism. Whereas “the Church needed the nation to free it from
Greek dominion,” the nation needed the Church for cultural leadership.
In fact, the Bulgarians were so intent on ecclesiastical autonomy from the Greeks that, by
February 1870, the Ottoman government felt compelled to issue a ferman (royal permission)
decreeing the formation of a separate Bulgarian Orthodox Church. While the Bulgarian Exarchate
8
5 Minkov, passim.
6 Crampton, 19-20.
7 Ibid., 25.
8 Ibid., 64.
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