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Religion, State and Society

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Uneasy tolerance: Interreligious relations in Bulgaria after the fall of communism

Ina Merdjanova

Online Publication Date: 01 June 2007

To cite this Article Merdjanova, Ina(2007)'Uneasy tolerance: Interreligious relations in Bulgaria after the fall of communism ',Religion,

State and Society,35:2,95 103

To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/09637490701271111 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09637490701271111

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Religion, State & Society, Vol. 35, No. 2, June 2007

Uneasy Tolerance: Interreligious Relations in Bulgaria after the Fall of Communism*

INA MERDJANOVA

Historical Background The rst Bulgarian state was established in 681 by Prince Asparukh, and the mass conversion of Bulgarians to Christianity took place two centuries later, in 864, under Prince Boris I. In the beginning the Bulgarian Church was an autonomous archbishopric under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. As a result of its christianisation the Bulgarian kingdom became part of the so-called Byzantine Commonwealth,1 which was dominated by the Eastern Christian, or Byzantine, ritual and canonical model of Christianity and the attendant church-state relations.2 The Ottoman conquest of the Balkan peninsula in the fourteenth and fteenth centuries put an end to the medieval Bulgarian kingdom and its autonomous church, subordinating the latter completely to the Patriarchate of Constantinople. The Ottomans established the so-called millet system, wherein the millets were selfgoverning units based on the confessional aliation of the various populations and administered by the respective religious hierarchy. This specic style of societal organisation privileged religious belonging over ethnic or national identities. Consequently the struggle for the establishment of independent nation-states everywhere in the Balkans throughout the nineteenth century involved as an indispensable component the establishment/restoration of autonomous national churches. The Bulgarian church was reinstated in the form of an autonomous Exarchate in 1870; but this was denounced as schismatic by the patriarch of Constantinople because of the noncanonical way in which the autonomy was achieved (the church was declared autonomous by a decree of the Turkish sultan). In 1878 the Bulgarian people gained independence from the Ottomans and proclaimed their own nation-state; however, the schismatic status of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church was revoked only in 1945, while the Bulgarian Patriarchate was restored in 1952. Why was this accomplished only with the coming of the communists to power? The goal of the communist regime was, of course, not to bolster the prestige of the church; this important act aimed to cut the Bulgarian Church o from the
*An earlier version of this paper was presented at the CAREE (Christians Associated for Relations with Eastern Europe) conference Legacy of a Slavic Pope in Eastern Europe: Prospects for Ecumenism, 18 November 2005, within the framework of the AAR annual meeting in Philadelphia, USA, and appeared in Religion in Eastern Europe, 26, 1, 2006. ISSN 0963-7494 print; ISSN 1465-3974 online/07/020095-09 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/09637490701271111

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inuence of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and to promote closer ties with the Russian Orthodox Church, as an additional way of bringing the two nations closer together (for a detailed discussion, see Kalkandzhieva, 2002). The communists abolished religious education, conscated church property and launched attacks on the clergy, thereby completely taking over the management of the church, which was gradually marginalised3 and turned into an obedient tool of the new regime. The collapse of the communist regime gave the Bulgarian Orthodox Church an opportunity to recover from its spiritual and institutional stagnation. In 1991 the ecclesiastical academy was restored to its initial status as a theological faculty within Soa University, and since the 2001-02 academic year it has oered a four-year bachelor studies programme as well as a two-year masters programme. A second theological faculty at Veliko T arnovo University has been established and theology has also been introduced as a discipline at Shumen and Plovdiv Universities. However, the church met the postcommunist challenges extremely weakened by its communist legacy: its personnel included a high proportion of communist pawns, strict control had prevented anybody with higher-than-average grades from enrolling at the academy, and the crippled and corrupted church leadership continued to perpetuate itself after collapse of the old regime. The church was torn apart by heated debates over the past compromises of its hierarchy. In 1992 the Bulgarian Orthodox Church went through one of the most tragic experiences in its history. It was divided into two, not without the active interference of the state authorities, who registered and thus legitimated an alternative Holy Synod. Many subsequent attempts to heal the rift have remained without result, and the church has failed to address constructively the complex, disastrous and far-reaching consequences of its internal split. The 2002 Law on Confessions (Zakon za veroizpovedaniyata) granted ocial status to the Bulgarian Patriarchate as well as automatic registration (while all other religious communities had to register in court). Consequently, according to this law, the alternative Synod could neither register under the name Bulgarian Orthodox Church, as another religious community with that name already had ocial legal status, nor claim any property belonging to this church. In 2004 the authorities evicted members of the alternative synod from around 250 church buildings claimed by the latter. Many priests from that synod rejoined the Patriarchate and thus the split was ocially ended. Another serious challenge confronting the Bulgarian Orthodox Church since the end of communism has been the new experience of a political, cultural and religious pluralism, for which the church was largely unprepared, lacking both an adequate theological and an eective sociological methodology. Other Religious Communities Eastern Christianity has been the predominant religion of most Bulgarians throughout the centuries, but the religious history of Bulgaria is not just the history of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church: it also comprises the histories of the Muslim, the Jewish and other Christian communities that have lived side by side for centuries (see Table 1). These other religious communities too suered repression at the hands of the communists. The Muslim community is the second-largest religious community in Bulgaria (on the Muslims, see Popovic, 1986; Eminov, 1997; Ho pken, 1997; Konstantinov, 1997). The policies of the communist government towards the countrys Muslim minorities were highly volatile and driven largely by the-stick-and-the-carrot approach. They saw considerable variation between 1945 and 1989. Perceiving Islam as a serious obstacle

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Table 1. Population by religion and ethnicity Religious self-identication 2001 (percentages in parentheses) Bulgarian Orthodox Muslims Undeclared Catholics Protestants Unknown Other Total 6,552,751 (82.64) 966,978 (12.2) [of whom 85,733 Alevis (7.7 per cent of all Muslims) according to the 1992 census] 283,309 (3.57) 43,811 (0.55) (plus 18,000 Eastern-rite Catholics) 42,308 (0.53) 24,807 (0.31) 14,937 (0.19), of whom 1363 (0.02) Jews 7,928,901

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Ethnic minorities 2001 (percentages in parentheses) Roma Turks Pomaks

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Tatars

370,908 (4.7) estimates: 700,000 800,000 (8.8 0.1) 746,664 (9.4) estimates: 600,000 700,000 (7.6 .8) Not listed in census results estimates 200,000 270,000 (2.5 3.4) 4515 (0.05)

These statistical data are based mainly on the 2001 census (Census, 2001), with small additions based on other sources. Note that there is a dierence between ethnic self-identication (on which the census data are based) and ethnic identication by others. The Turkish minority is thus estimated to be smaller than the census results indicate, as a number of Muslim Roma and Pomaks identied themselves as ethnic Turks in the census. The estimate for Roma, on the other hand, is higher than the number indicated in the census.

to the integration of Turks and other Muslims into Bulgarian society, the Communist Party attempted to create a socialist Turkish minority. It suppressed religious identication and encouraged the development of a secular elite among the ethnic Turkish citizens through the improvement of their educational and cultural conditions. As a result of the restrictions and the oppressive practices of the communist regime, and under the inuence of Kemalist Turkey, the primary identity focus for the countrys Turkish minority changed from religion to ethnicity. In the 1970s and 1980s the traditional Turco-Arabic names of Muslims were forcibly replaced by Bulgarian ones. Particularly brutal was the campaign to assimilate the Turkish-speaking population, which took place in 1984-85, when severe measures against religious practice and the public use of the Turkish language were introduced. More than 350,000 Bulgarian Turks left the country for Turkey (of whom about 100,000 later returned). Despite the communist governments eorts to undermine the religious aliation of the Muslim and Turkish population through anti-Islamic propaganda, conscation of the property of charitable foundations (waqf), reduction of the number of functioning mosques and persecution of religious leaders, Turks and other Muslims persisted in performing their traditional rites based on Islam. The branches of the two last Su tariqas in Bulgaria, Naqshbandiyya and Qadiriyya, surviving in the northeastern part of the country, are reported to have performed their rites until 1982, when their meetings were proscribed by the local authorities (De Jong, 1986). Even surveys conducted under communism in the 1970s and early 1980s conrmed that religiosity among the Turkish population was twice as high as that among the Bulgarians. In 1985 only 25 per cent of ethnic Bulgarians declared that they were religious, in contrast to 55 per cent of Turks (Ho pken, 1997, p. 69).

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Since the end of communism Muslims have become a more visible presence in society. They have gained new opportunities both for religious and cultural revitalisation and for political mobilisation. Civil society organisations and associations oriented towards the problems of the Muslims have mushroomed throughout the country. Three Muslim schools and an Islamic higher education institute provide for the educational needs of the community, while more than 1000 mosques and prayer houses organise its religious life. A political party representing the Muslim population, the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (Dvizhenie za prava i svobodi), appeared, and it has been represented in every parliament since 1990. The political leaders of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms have been very careful to preclude any identication with Islamist or pan-Turkist ideas. They use an essentially secular and moderate language in their programmes and statements. The Movement has been open to all Bulgarian citizens, in spite of the fact that it has drawn support primarily from Turks and other Muslims. The Muslim community in Bulgaria is highly diversied both ethnically (it includes Turks, Pomaks, Roma and Tatars) and religiously (the Turkish Muslims are divided into a larger Sunni group and a smaller group of heterodox Alevi). The Alevi Muslims in the country are called Aliani or Kaz albashi (red heads) after their traditional headgear with twelve stripes representing the twelve imams. Most of the Kaz albashi came from Anatolia and settled in the north-eastern part of the country between the fteenth and seventeenth centuries and were associated with various Su orders active in the Balkans during Ottoman times (De Jong, 1993, pp. 200 06). The Kaz albashi have been considered heretical by the majority Sunnis. Because of periodic persecutions they have tended to conceal their identity and often to represent themselves as either Sunnis or Bektashis (Norris, 1993, p. 98). The other three ethnic groups in the Muslim community are the Pomaks, the Roma and the Tatars. The Pomaks are Bulgarian-speaking Muslims, also called Muslims of Bulgarian ethnic origin. They are a predominantly rural population, mainly living in Pomak enclaves in the Rhodope mountains. After the fall of communism, when their identity was dramatically challenged by the new realities, the Pomaks have generally split into three subgroups. One group has emphasised its Bulgarian ethnic aliation and converted to Christianity, another group has claimed a Turkish ethnic identity4, even though they do not speak Turkish, and a third group has made tentative attempts to construct a new ethnic identity on the basis of Islam. The data on the religious aliations of the Roma are highly uncertain, as this population tends to change its religious self-identication, and is generally divided into a Muslim and various Christian subgroups. The Tatars numbered 4515 in 1992 (down from around 100,000 in the 1870s). They live in north-eastern Bulgaria in areas that are populated predominantly by ethnic Turks and have tended to assimilate into this population linguistically, socially and culturally, or to emigrate to Turkey. The Roman Catholic community in Bulgaria was severely persecuted by the communist regime, because Catholicism was considered the religion of fascism and a vector of foreign inuence. Catholic priests were charged with antisocialist activities and with supporting opposition parties. In the early 1950s the property of the Catholic parishes was conscated, all schools, clubs and colleges were closed and the Catholic Church was deprived of its legal status. In 1990 relations with the Vatican were reestablished and in 2002 the pope visited Bulgaria. Roman Catholics and Eastern-rite Catholics enjoy good cooperative relations today. Various Protestant groups date back to the mid-nineteenth century, when missionaries from the USA introduced Methodism into northern Bulgaria and

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Congregationalism into the south. In 1875 the Protestants formed the Bulgarian lgarsko evangelsko druzhestvo), which was later Evangelical Philanthropic Society (Ba yuz na transformed into the Union of Evangelical Churches in Bulgaria (Sa rkvi v Ba lgariya). Under communism the property of the Protestant evangelskite tsa churches was conscated and many pastors and ordinary believers were forcefully relocated throughout the country or moved underground. After 1989 the old Protestant churches considered traditional for Bulgaria were rehabilitated, many new churches were registered and a number of Protestant NGOs carrying out educational and religious activities appeared. In 1999 a Higher Evangelical Theological Institute (Visshi evangelski bogoslovski institut) was established through the unication of four dierent evangelical schools that had appeared in Bulgaria in the early 1990s. The Jewish community consists mainly of Sephardic Jews, and also comprises a small number of Ashkenazi Jews. During the Second World War the Jews living in Bulgaria (about 50,000) were saved from deportation to the death camps by the active intervention both of politicians and of the leadership of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. Considered by the communists a national rather than a religious group, about 90 per cent of the Bulgarian Jews left the country for Israel after the Second World War. Apart from the religious minorities considered traditional for Bulgaria, after the fall of communism a number of New Religious Movements (NRMs) arrived from Western Europe and North America. Both the Orthodox Church and society at large reacted with anxiety and fear to the emerging religious pluralism. The common perception, fostered powerfully by most of the media, and evident in designations like destructive cults and dangerous sects, was highly negative. NRMs were seen as a threat to national identity because they were said to promote the interests of foreign missions and organisations; they were considered harmful by the Orthodox Church, because they allegedly eroded its newly gained position in society by robbing it of what it saw as its legitimate ock; they were also deemed to be destructive to family life, as they often fuelled conict between younger converts and their parents. A 1993 sociological investigation into the prevailing social views on NRMs in Bulgaria showed that 68 per cent of those interviewed held that the activity of alternative religions in the country should be forbidden, while half of all those interviewed were convinced that new religions had no place in a democratic society.5 The investigation revealed clearly a prevailing intolerance and lack of understanding among the general Bulgarian public about the nature of the processes of democratisation and particularly of an important aspect of the democratic project: religious and cultural pluralism. People were not ready to accept the legitimacy of alternative religious formations or to coexist peacefully with them. In fact, a considerable decline in the size and signicance of NRMs seems already to be an emerging trend everywhere in Eastern Europe. The inux of NRMs and the rapid rise in their membership in the rst years after the fall of communism has ceased. According to data quoted by Khadzhiiska (1995, p. 145), in 1993 about one per cent of the Bulgarian population, that is about 85,000 people, were registered as members of alternative religious movements. The approximate number of adherents of NRMs that I estimated on the basis of data given by Petkov (1998) for the various religious communities (in a book of interviews with their leaders) showed that their membership in 1998 had dropped to about one tenth of what it had been just ve years earlier. I relate this decline to the fact that Bulgarian society is highly secularised6 and to the relative stabilisation of the religious market in the country.

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Various new religions have found their niches in society and now function in more or less predictable ways (discussed in Merdjanova, 2002, pp. 5456).

Interreligious and Interethnic Relations Negative Tolerance In contrast to the generally intolerant attitudes toward the NRMs which came to the country after the fall of communism, sociological surveys have revealed quite a high level of religious tolerance among and toward the so-called traditional religions. Normally, Christians and Muslims live peacefully side by side. The practice of heterodox Su-related orders (among which the Alevi gure prominently in the country) of revering saints and shrines has drawn Muslims and Christians closer together. In Bulgaria many of the Muslim tekke (buildings for Su brotherhood meetings) have as a patron a Christian saint as well, while a number of saints bear both a Christian and a Muslim identity. Thus Kh ad arlez is the Muslim counterpart of St George and Sar as alt ak of St Nicholas. It is not an uncommon practice for Muslims and Christians to share pilgrimage sites for example Demir Baba tekke in north-eastern Bulgaria is frequented by Alevi and Sunni Muslims, as well as by Christians, and the same is valid for some churches with tombs of Christian saints (for example St Nicholas church in the southern town of Smolyan), where Christians and Muslims alike stay overnight when seeking to improve their health. A nuanced understanding of tolerance, however, dierentiates between negative and positive tolerance (also called by some authors passive and active tolerance). Generally, negative tolerance can be dened as a position of pragmatic noninterference and putting up with dierence, while positive tolerance implies not just enduring and bearing with the religiously other, but embracing an active attitude of respect and appreciation for the value of dierence. For example, a test for positive tolerance is whether a particular religious community is ready to protect the freedom of other religions as well as its own freedom. I want to argue that what seem to prevail in Bulgaria are manifestations of negative tolerance. The established Christian-Muslim relations, for example, t neatly into the model of komshiluk (from the Turkish word komshiya, meaning neighbour), according to which people of dierent ethnic or religious groups live peacefully and even cooperatively in close proximity, yet the groups preserve their structural and cultural dierences and their boundaries remain well-sustained and generally unbridgeable.7 Intracommunal Power Struggles Recent Bulgarian history has not seen conicts generated by or related to interreligious controversies. Since 1989 there have however been a number of heated intrareligious disputes related to internal power struggles and contests over who has the authority to speak on behalf of each particular community and to control its property. The Muslim community went through a serious split very similar to the one experienced by the Orthodox Church. A severe contest over the post of chief mufti led to the establishment of rival Muslim councils selecting rival chief muftis, and subsequent lawsuits, accompanied by mutual accusations and bitter ghts in the media.

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On the whole, religious communities remain relatively closed and focused on their own problems, which are by no means negligible in the postcommunist context. The positive resolving of intracommunal tensions and problems is of primary importance for the sustainable development of the religious communities, but their continued introversion carries the risk of the reinforcement of a specic fortress mentality inherited from communist times. Interreligious dialogue in this situation is particularly desirable because it will bring new experiences and perspectives which could help in the resolution of communities internal controversies. Barriers to Interreligious Dialogue One important barrier to interreligious dialogue remains inequality in terms of social power and inuence (majority versus minority religions). Another is the construction of a national identity around the religious identication of the majority Orthodox population, a construction which provides a clear example of a powerful interplay between religion and politics and of the appropriation of the religious discourse by the project of nationalism. A third serious obstacle is the generally rather low level of religious education in Bulgarian society. People seem to be ignorant not only of the religious teachings and practices of others, but of their own religious tradition as well. In this situation, the potentially inammatory role of the media in fuelling negative attitudes and intolerance by selective and tendentious reporting is not to be neglected. Prevailing religious ignorance, coupled with the activities of manipulative, sensationalist and oftentimes also religiously un(der)educated media, could in the long run prove to be a formula for interreligious tensions and even conicts. Conclusion On the whole, since 1989 Bulgaria has made signicant progress in the (closely related) areas of interethnic and interreligious relations. It has reversed communist assimilation campaigns and introduced mother-tongue education for minority children as well as religious education. Moreover, it has adopted a number of important pieces of legislation, such as the Council of Europes Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, a comprehensive government programme for the integration of the Roma minority (the Framework Programme lgarskoto obshtestvo)), (Ramkova programa za ravnopravno integrirane na romite v ba and a Law on Protection against Discrimination (Zakon za zashtita sreshtu diskriminatsiyata). In December 2002 the government passed a new law on religion that replaced the law of 1949. Changes in policy and legislation have not always been followed through and put into practice, however, and interreligious tolerance, while present in society, has remained uneasy and along the negative lines described above. All this proves once again how dicult it is to create a culture of tolerance (or what Robert Bellah would call tolerant habits of the heart) even after considerable structural changes have been carried out.

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Notes
1 This phrase was coined by the historian Dimitri Obolensky (see Obolensky, 1971).

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2 While the dominant principle of church-state relations in the Christian West has been expressed by the idea of the two spheres, or the separation of ecclesiastical and secular authorities (Render the things of Caesar unto Caesar and the things of God unto God), the construction of these relations in the Christian East has been dominated by the vision of a symphony (Eusebius of Caesarea, fourth century) between the power of the secular government and the spiritual authority of the church. In Byzantium the emperor was formally seen as an external apostle of the church (as Eusebius of Caesarea called Constantine the Great), who was able to intervene powerfully in the activities and policies of the church. Sometimes these two theories are called papocaesarism and caesaropapism respectively, but the implication that the pope always prevailed in the former system and the emperor in the latter does not correspond to reality. Only extreme cases, such as the replacement by Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century of the Russian Patriarchate with a Holy Synod, headed by a lay procurator appointed by the tsar, represent clear examples of caesaropapism in Eastern Christianity. 3 Believers could not be members of the Communist Party, a fact that in itself barred them from pursuing protable careers. Those who attended church were under the surveillance of the security agencies and persistence often meant job loss. No wonder believers gradually came to be seen as second-class citizens. 4 During the 1992 census about 35,000 Pomaks in the district of Blagoevgrad identied themselves as ethnic Turks, which led to nationwide protest against the census results, which were perceived as awed, and the subsequent nullication of the census results on ethnic identity, mother tongue and religious belief for this district. 5 These data support the observation of Eileen Barker that in Eastern Europe for a sizeable proportion of the population, pluralism, in the sense of a peaceful co-existence of alternative religions, has been, and for many remains, an alien concept (Barker, 1998, p. 20). 6 The observation that Bulgarian society is one of the most secular in Europe (see for instance Martin, 1996, p. 9; Ramet, 1995, p. 157) is conrmed by the data quoted by Khadzhiiska (1995, pp. 145 46). Khadzhiiska points out that in 1990 only 4 per cent of those interviewed answered in the armative the question whether they believed in God. I remain sceptical as to whether the data supplied by Khadzhiiska on a subsequent huge growth of those claiming to be believers (25 per cent in 1991 and 63 per cent in 1992) reect the real state of aairs. 7 The practice of komshiluk in the Balkan countries dates back to Ottoman time and can be found in practically all settings with mixed population. Tone Bringa, for example, observed it during her anthropological study in a Muslim-Croat Bosnian village just before the recent war in Bosnia. According to Bringa, while following clear obligations of reciprocity and mutual help on a number of occasions, the two ethno-religious groups strictly preserved their distinctions. An important way of sustaining their boundaries was by prohibiting intermarriage between members of the two groups (Bringa, 1995).

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