Why Bulgarians are not religious?

Bulgaria is one of the oldest nations in Europe. Originally, we were formed by Slavic and Bulgarian tribes.

The Slavs were living on the Balkan peninsula, the Bulgarian tribes came from Asia to conquer new lands during the time of the Barbarian Invasions, which we call the “Great Migration of the Nations”. They stayed on the Balkans and started mixing with the local population.

The Slavs and the Bulgarians were polytheistic and cherished different Gods.

In year 864 Tzar Boris I, was under pressure to Christianize Bulgaria, accepting the new religion from either the Catholic church (the Roman Empire) or the Orthodox church (the Byzantine empire). All this was needed to ensure political security for the country.  

He chose the Orthodoxy since the Byzantine empire was a neighbor, and Bulgaria became Christian. Of course, there was an internal resistance. Those who did not want to comply with the new religion were chased and even killed.

Later on, in the 14^th century, the Ottoman empire occupied the Balkans. Bulgaria vanished from the map, and the Bulgarians became slaves to the Turks for nearly 500 years. The Bulgarian population faced a lot of torture, horrific barbarian killings, misery and harassment during these 500 years. They hated the Turks to their core. The Turks were taking their young boys to convert them into soldiers, who will later come back “as Turks” to harass and kill their own relatives, they were killing men and women and taking the young girls for slaves in the harems.

The Ottoman empire was Muslim. The Turks tried to Muslimize the Christian population on the Balkans.  In some country sides they succeeded, while in other locations they did not push so hard. Those who kept their Christianity were able to preserve their sense of belonging to the Bulgarian culture. Those who converted to Muslim religion, became Turks to avoid being killed, the aggression and the slavery. 

Over the course of the 500-year slavery, people were so tired and used to living in an “opposition mode”, that they were no longer believing the existence of God. People were getting born as slaves and dying as slaves, there was no rescue. 

There is a famous poem, from one of the most recognized revolutionaries of the resistance against the Ottoman Empire - Hristo Botev, called “My Prayer”. The poem was written sometime before 1876 and it clearly explains the stand of a man who have lost any believe in the Christian God. Тhis is how it goes:

O my God, my righteous God.

Not you, in heaven apart,

but you, who are within me, God -

within my soul and heart…

 

Not you, to whom the holy priests

and monks must genuflect

and all of orthodoxy's beasts

light tapers in respect;

not you, who once created man

and woman from the dirt,

then allowed their human clan

to be as slaves on earth;

 

not you, who have anointed kings,

popes, patriarchs and others,

and abandoned to their suffering

all the poor, my brothers;

 

not you, who but instruct the slave

by calm and prayer to cope

and then sustain him to the grave

upon his empty hopes;

 

not you, the true God of the cruel,

the liers and the sham,

not you, the idol of the fools

and the enemies of man.

 

But you, God of the human mind,

defender of the slave;

it soon shall be that all mankind

shall celebrate your day.

 

O God, inspire in every man

a love of liberty

that they may fight as best they can

the people' enemies.

 

Make powerful this hand of mine

for the rising of the slaves;

I'll join them at the battle-line

that I may find my grave.

 

Do not let this stormy heart

grow cold in foreign lands,

let not my voice in silence pass

as if through desert sands.

 

After the liberation, Bulgaria became a monarchy, and stayed this way until the 2^nd World War.

When the Communism took over the power, the religion became an obsolete entity. The churches and the patriarchy were preserved as a cultural entity, but the religion was perceived as a backward and old-fashioned activity, used once before to control the masses from the dark centuries.

The society was heavily encouraged and directed to exceed in science, technological progress and analytical thinking based on all the available world resources, rather than to believes in mythological tales and religion.

After the fall of the Communism, the newly democratized country faced boom in the organized crime, corruption, financial schema and racket. There were approximately 10-15 years of wild times, during which the mafia became very powerful and manifested their presence heavily.

All the mobsters were parading their religiousness through building churches and calling hotels with saint’s names, or Greek god’s names, while it was obvious that they were doing all this to compensate for all the killings and crimes they were committing in the meanwhile.

Bulgaria is and will always remain an atheistic country in its core, because it has vast history, diverse cultural background and has experienced many contradictive political changes which have shown that religion is only a political tool used by the next political power to control the masses.