Bulgarian Greek Catholic Church: The Complete History from Tsar Boris to the Eparchy of Saint John XXIII
The Complete Guide
Bulgarian Greek Catholic Church: The Complete History — From Tsar Boris to the Eparchy of Saint John XXIII
The story of a small, tenacious church that turned the struggle for national identity into an act of faith — and survived Hellenization, Ottoman rule, and Communist firing squads to stand in Sofia today
The Bulgarian Greek Catholic Church is one of the smallest sui iuris churches in the Catholic world — approximately ten thousand faithful, twenty-one parishes, a single eparchy in Sofia. In purely numerical terms, it barely registers. In terms of what it has survived and what it represents, it is one of the most remarkable communities in the history of Eastern Christianity.
It was born not from a political settlement or a diplomatic union but from a genuine national crisis: the desire of Bulgarian Christians, under Ottoman rule, to reclaim their own liturgical and ecclesiastical identity from the Greek hierarchy that had systematically erased it. Its founding moment was nationalistic as much as theological. Its most dramatic chapter was the cold-blooded execution of its bishop by a Communist firing squad in 1952. Its most unexpected patron was a future Pope who spent nine years in Sofia as a young Vatican diplomat and never forgot what he saw there.
The eparchy today bears his name. The Bulgarian Greek Catholic Eparchy of Saint John XXIII of Sofia — named for Angelo Roncalli, who organized the church in the 1920s and 1930s as the Apostolic Visitator, and who as Pope John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council and presided over one of the most transformative moments in Catholic history — is the canonical successor to an institution that has been suppressed, fractured, re-founded, persecuted, martyred, and restored over more than a century and a half.
This is its complete story.
The Roots: Tsar Boris I and the Christianization of Bulgaria (864 AD)
The Bulgarian Greek Catholic Church's roots extend far deeper than 1861 — all the way to 864 AD, when Tsar Boris I led the Bulgarian people in their conversion to Christianity. The precise manner of that conversion is one of the most revealing political stories in early medieval history, and it explains much about the Bulgarian church's perpetual tension between East and West.
Boris I came to the throne of the First Bulgarian Empire in 852. He was a pragmatic ruler governing a diverse population of Bulgar nomads and Slavic farmers, unified by the Bulgarian state but not yet by a common faith. He understood that Christianity was the common currency of both of the great powers that flanked him — the Byzantine Empire to the south and the Frankish kingdoms to the northwest — and that choosing the right form of Christianity was as much a geopolitical decision as a spiritual one.
In 863, Boris opened negotiations with the Frankish king Louis the German for the dispatch of Latin-rite missionaries. The Byzantines interpreted this as a direct challenge to their sphere of influence. They invaded Bulgaria during a period of famine and natural disasters, quickly demonstrating that military reality would override diplomatic preference. Taken by surprise and forced to sue for peace, Boris agreed to accept Christianity from Byzantine clergy. He was baptized at Pliska, the First Bulgarian capital, by bishops from Constantinople in 864, with the Byzantine Emperor Michael III serving as his godfather.
But Boris had not given up on his ecclesiastical independence. In 866, in a remarkable display of strategic theology, he simultaneously sent delegations to both Pope Nicholas I in Rome and the Patriarch of Constantinople, asking each to provide a proper hierarchy for the Bulgarian church. The pope's detailed response — known as the "Responses of Pope Nicholas I to the Questions of the Bulgars" — was one of the most comprehensive documents on Christian practice and church organization of the entire early medieval period, covering everything from marriage to military ethics to the proper form of baptism. Boris genuinely considered a Roman alignment. But ultimately, the political and geographic reality of Byzantine power prevailed. In 870, at the Fourth Council of Constantinople, the Bulgarian church was assigned to the jurisdiction of Constantinople.
What Bulgaria received in exchange was more important than any alliance: the disciples of Saints Cyril and Methodius. In 886, Boris I welcomed Clement of Ohrid, Naum of Ohrid, and other disciples of the apostles to the Slavs, who had been expelled from Great Moravia. These missionaries brought the Glagolitic script, the Cyrillic alphabet (developed by Clement), and the Church Slavonic liturgy — transforming the Bulgarian church from a Greek-rite mission field into an original center of Slavic Christian culture. The Preslav Literary School became one of the most important intellectual institutions in medieval Europe. The Bulgarian language, Bulgarian literacy, and Bulgarian Christian identity were formed together in this generation.
Bulgaria achieved something no other Slavic people had achieved in the medieval period: two separate autocephalous Patriarchates recognized by Constantinople. The first was proclaimed by Tsar Symeon the Great in 917 and recognized by Constantinople in 927. It lasted until the fall of the First Bulgarian Empire in 1018. The second was established after the Bulgarian state regained independence in 1186, with the Patriarch of Constantinople recognizing the Bulgarian Patriarchate in 1235. This second Patriarchate ended with the Ottoman conquest in 1393. The loss of the Patriarchate was not merely an ecclesiastical change — it was a cultural and national catastrophe, as Greek clergy replaced Bulgarian clergy at every level of church life.
Medieval Unions with Rome: Kaloyan, Innocent III, and the Council of Florence
The relationship between the Bulgarian church and Rome did not begin in 1861. It has a much older history — one characterized by repeated negotiations, temporary unions, political calculations, and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to establish a lasting Catholic presence in Bulgaria before the 19th-century Uniat movement.
Tsar Kaloyan and Pope Innocent III (1204)
The most significant medieval union came under Tsar Kaloyan (1197–1207), one of the most capable rulers of the Second Bulgarian Empire. In 1199, Pope Innocent III had written to Kaloyan inviting him to unite his church with the Catholic Church. Kaloyan was deeply interested — not primarily for theological reasons, but for political ones. He wanted two things that only the Pope could provide: the title of Emperor (rather than merely King or Knyaz) and official recognition of the head of the Bulgarian Church as Patriarch.
The negotiations were delicate. The Pope was unwilling to grant everything Kaloyan wanted. When Cardinal Leo arrived in Bulgaria as the papal envoy in 1204, he crowned Kaloyan with a royal crown — not an imperial one — and consecrated Archbishop Vasilij of Tărnovo as Primate of Bulgaria (a title equivalent to Patriarch in practice, though not in name). Bulgaria entered formal union with Rome, keeping its own ecclesiastical and liturgical usages, in exchange for recognition of the papal supremacy.
The union did not last. Bulgaria's conflict with the newly established Latin Empire of Constantinople — and Byzantine diplomatic pressure — unraveled the arrangement within decades. A Bulgarian Council in 1235 formally proclaimed the autonomy of the Bulgarian Church in communion with the Patriarch of Nicaea (the Byzantine successor to Constantinople after 1204), separating from Rome. Bulgaria definitively entered the Byzantine ecclesiastical sphere, and the brief medieval union with Rome became a historical memory rather than a living institution.
The Council of Florence (1439)
The Council of Florence attempted a universal union of Eastern and Western Christianity, and a Bulgarian delegation participated. But the council's union decree for the Bulgarians had no practical effect: the Ottoman Turks had already conquered most of Bulgarian territory by 1393, and the Bulgarian Patriarchate had been abolished and its territory reunited with the Patriarchate of Constantinople. There was no Bulgarian ecclesiastical structure left to implement a union, even if one had been desired.
These medieval episodes matter for the Bulgarian Greek Catholic story because they establish a pattern: Bulgaria had a genuine historical connection to Rome dating back to the very foundation of its Christian identity, a connection that the 19th-century Uniat movement could invoke as a legitimate heritage rather than a foreign innovation.
Under the Ottoman Yoke: Hellenization and the Loss of a National Church
The Ottoman conquest of Bulgaria was completed in 1393. What followed was nearly five centuries of Turkish political rule — and, from the Bulgarian Christian perspective, something in some ways worse: the systematic replacement of the Bulgarian national church with Greek ecclesiastical control.
Under the Ottoman millet system, the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople served as the administrative intermediary between the Sultan's government and the Orthodox Christian population of the empire. This gave the Greek-controlled Patriarchate enormous power over the Bulgarian church. Greek bishops replaced Bulgarian bishops. The Bulgarian Patriarchate was abolished, its churches absorbed into the Greek hierarchy. The Church Slavonic liturgy — the liturgy that Clement of Ohrid and his colleagues had created specifically for the Bulgarian and Slavic peoples — was replaced by Greek. The specifically Bulgarian theological and literary tradition that had flourished under the Preslav and Tărnovo schools was suppressed.
The process reached its culmination in 1767, when the Bulgarian Archdiocese of Ohrid — one of the last formally recognized Bulgarian ecclesiastical bodies — was abolished by the Ecumenical Patriarch and its territory directly subordinated to Constantinople. Bulgarians were now ecclesiastically invisible: under Greek bishops, using Greek in the liturgy, their national church tradition treated as something to be overcome rather than preserved. The Bulgarian clergy who had not been replaced by Greeks were marginalized and their traditions actively suppressed.
This Hellenization was not merely an ecclesiastical inconvenience. It was a cultural and national assault. The Bulgarian language, literacy, and identity had been built through the church. When the church became Greek, it threatened to take the national consciousness with it. The Bulgarian national revival of the late 18th and early 19th centuries — the period historians call the "Bulgarian National Revival" or "Vŭzrazhdane" — was in large part a reaction against this ecclesiastical Hellenization, and the struggle for Bulgarian control of the Bulgarian church became the central battleground of Bulgarian national identity.
The Bulgarian Church Question: Nationalism, Greek Domination, and the Road to Rome
By the mid-19th century, the struggle for ecclesiastical independence from Constantinople had become the defining issue of Bulgarian national life. The "Bulgarian Church Question" — the question of whether Bulgarians could have their own, nationally-identified Orthodox church free from Greek control — was debated in coffeehouses and newspapers, in village assemblies and Ottoman government offices, in letters to European diplomatic missions and petitions to the Sultan himself.
The movement for union with Rome emerged directly from this struggle, not as an alternative to it but as one proposed solution to it. The reasoning was straightforward: if the Bulgarian church under Constantinople was a Greek church that denied Bulgarian national identity, perhaps the Bulgarian church under Rome — which had promised to preserve Eastern rites while granting genuine ecclesiastical autonomy — would be different. Rome was far away and had no Greek national interest in the Balkans. Rome had, at least in theory, a track record of allowing Eastern churches to maintain their own traditions. Rome might be the instrument through which Bulgarians could reclaim their liturgy, their language, and their bishops.
The leading figure of the Uniat movement was Dragan Tsankov, a Bulgarian merchant based in Constantinople, who had the active support of Catholic France. He published a newspaper called Bulgaria in Constantinople, which advocated for union with the Pope and published historical documents demonstrating the connections between the Catholic Church and the Bulgarian kings in medieval times — deliberately building the narrative that union with Rome was a return to a historical tradition, not an alien novelty. The paper criticized Russia for its negative stance on the Bulgarian church question, which it rightly identified as an obstacle to any arrangement that did not serve Russian Orthodox interests.
The movement had two geographical centers. In Kukush (a Bulgarian-populated city in present-day northern Greece), citizens wrote a letter to the Pope in 1859 acknowledging his administrative and spiritual leadership. In exchange, they demanded three things: no changes to their Eastern rites of worship; the right to choose their own bishops and lower clergy, with papal approval; and the right to choose teachers at church schools, with education conducted in the Bulgarian language and national alphabet. These were not theological demands — they were cultural and national ones, and Rome accepted them.
In Constantinople itself, another group of Bulgarian activists approached the Catholic Armenian Archbishop of Istanbul in 1860, seeking to formalize their movement toward Rome through an established Eastern Catholic intermediary. By 1861 the movement was organized enough to send a formal delegation to Rome.
Joseph Sokolsky: The First Bishop, the Russian Ship, and the Captive Archbishop
The founding moment of the Bulgarian Greek Catholic Church as a formal institution came on April 8, 1861, in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Pope Pius IX personally ordained an elderly Bulgarian archimandrite named Joseph Sokolsky as a bishop, naming him Archbishop for Bulgarian Catholics of the Byzantine Rite. It was an extraordinary gesture — a personal papal ordination, the highest possible endorsement Rome could give to the new church.
Sokolsky returned to Constantinople with his new dignity. The Ottoman government, calculated to gain leverage over the Greek-dominated Ecumenical Patriarchate, recognized him as such — an early indication of how the Uniat movement had become entangled in the great-power politics of the Eastern Question. Russia, which saw itself as the protector of Orthodox interests in the Ottoman Empire and regarded any Catholic gains in the Balkans as a direct threat to Russian influence, was alarmed. A Bulgarian Catholic church, recognized by the Ottoman authorities and backed by France and Rome, was the last thing the Russian government wanted in Constantinople.
What happened next remains, as CNEWA puts it, one of the episodes whose "exact details have never been revealed." In June 1861 — within weeks of his return to Constantinople — Archbishop Sokolsky disappeared. He was, as historical sources delicately phrase it, "forced to travel to Odessa on a Russian ship." He had been abducted by Russian agents. He was taken to the Kyiv Caves Monastery in Ukraine, where he was held for the remaining eighteen years of his life, dying there as a prisoner of the Russian state. He never returned to Bulgaria. He never led the church he had been ordained to lead. The first Archbishop for Bulgarian Catholics of the Byzantine Rite spent his entire episcopal tenure as a captive.
The Russian government's action was brazen — a kidnapping of a recognized Ottoman official by the agents of a foreign power, carried out in broad daylight in the Ottoman capital — but the Tsar's leverage in Constantinople was sufficient to prevent consequences. The message to the Bulgarian Uniat movement was clear: Russia would not permit the establishment of a Bulgarian Catholic church if it could prevent it.
Joseph Sokolsky
Ordained by Pope Pius IX on April 8, 1861 — the first Bishop of the Bulgarian Greek Catholic Church. Abducted by Russian agents in June 1861, he spent 18 years as a prisoner in the Kyiv Caves Monastery, dying there without ever leading his church. His captivity is the most dramatic emblem of the great-power forces arrayed against Bulgarian Catholic independence.
Blessed Eugene Bossilkov
Bishop of Nicopolis, Passionist, martyr. Executed by Communist firing squad November 11, 1952. Beatified by Pope John Paul II March 15, 1998 — the first martyr of Communist Eastern Europe to be beatified by the Catholic Church. Body never recovered. His last words to his niece: "I have not betrayed the Church."
Despite Sokolsky's removal, the movement did not collapse. Raphael Popov succeeded him as administrator of the Bulgarian Catholic exarchate from 1865 to 1876. At its peak there were approximately 80,000 Bulgarian Byzantine Catholics — an impressive number for a movement barely a decade old, operating under Ottoman rule and in the face of active Russian opposition. But the ultimate blow to the Uniat movement would come not from Russian abductions but from a more fundamental political transformation.
Byzantine Icons for Prayer
Christ Pantocrator — The Icon at the Heart of the Bulgarian Byzantine Tradition
60,000 Converts and the Collapse: The Bulgarian Orthodox Exarchate of 1870
The Bulgarian Greek Catholic movement's rise and fall in the 1860s is one of the most instructive examples in history of how religion, nationalism, and great-power politics can intersect with fateful consequences. The church had gained approximately 60,000 adherents — a significant community for a movement barely a decade old. It had an Ottoman-recognized leadership. It had the support of France and Rome. It was growing.
But the Uniat movement had always been primarily a vehicle for nationalist aims — a way to escape Greek ecclesiastical domination — rather than a deep theological commitment to Catholic doctrine and papal authority. When another vehicle for those same national aims appeared, most of the movement's adherents switched to it almost immediately.
That vehicle was the Bulgarian Orthodox Exarchate. In 1870, the Ottoman Sultan issued a firman (imperial decree) recognizing a separate Bulgarian Orthodox Exarchate — an autonomous Bulgarian Orthodox church within the Ottoman Empire, independent of the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople. This was the breakthrough that Bulgarian Orthodox nationalists had been seeking for decades. The Ecumenical Patriarch declared the new Bulgarian Exarchate schismatic (the official split known as the "Bulgarian Schism" lasted until 1945), but the Ottoman government's recognition made the Exarchate a practical reality.
The result for the Bulgarian Greek Catholic movement was devastating. The Uniat movement had offered union with Rome as a way to escape Greek ecclesiastical control. Now there was an Orthodox alternative that achieved the same goal — a Bulgarian national church, conducted in Bulgarian, led by Bulgarian bishops — without requiring communion with the Pope. For the three-quarters of Bulgarian Byzantine Catholics who had joined the movement primarily as nationalists rather than as theological Catholics, the choice was clear. By the end of the 19th century, only about 15,000–20,000 Bulgarian Greek Catholics remained.
Those who stayed were, in a meaningful sense, the genuinely committed ones — those for whom the Catholic dimension of the Uniat movement was not incidental but essential, who valued not only the national identity but the specific combination of Eastern rite and Roman communion that the Bulgarian Greek Catholic Church offered. This residual community — concentrated primarily in villages of Macedonia and Thrace — became the foundation from which the modern church was built.
| Year | Event | Impact on Bulgarian Greek Catholics |
|---|---|---|
| 1861 | Sokolsky ordained by Pope Pius IX; ~60,000 adherents at peak | Church formally established; rapid growth during nationalist excitement |
| 1861 | Sokolsky abducted to Kiev by Russian agents | Leadership crisis; movement loses its first Archbishop before he can lead |
| 1870 | Ottoman Sultan recognizes the Bulgarian Orthodox Exarchate | Most Uniat converts return to Orthodoxy; ~three-quarters leave the church |
| 1878 | Berlin Treaty leaves Macedonia and Thrace in Ottoman Empire | Remaining Greek Catholics mostly in these territories; political instability continues |
| 1883 | Holy See reorganizes: Apostolic Vicariates in Thessaloniki (Macedonia) and Adrianople (Thrace), plus Apostolic Administrator in Constantinople | Church restructured for survival; small but persistent community |
| 1912–1913 | Balkan Wars — Bulgaria loses Macedonia and Thrace | Mass refugee movement of Bulgarian Catholics into Bulgaria proper |
| 1926 | Apostolic Exarchate of Sofia established under Angelo Roncalli | Church given its first stable canonical home within Bulgaria |
The Balkan Wars and the Refugees: Rebuilding from the Ruins
The early 20th century brought catastrophe to the Balkan Peninsula — and to the remaining Bulgarian Greek Catholic communities in particular. The Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 and the First World War (1914–1918) remapped the region entirely, displacing populations on a massive scale. Macedonia and Thrace — the territories where most of the remaining Bulgarian Byzantine Catholics had been concentrated since the collapse of the Uniat movement in the 1870s — changed hands repeatedly. Greeks, Bulgarians, and Serbs fought over the same villages. Populations that had been stable for generations were suddenly refugees.
As a result of these upheavals, large numbers of Bulgarian refugees — including the remaining Greek Catholic communities of Macedonia and Thrace — fled to what was now the Kingdom of Bulgaria. They arrived in their homeland as refugees from territories that had been Bulgarian-populated for centuries but were now under Greek or Serbian sovereignty. They brought with them their faith, their traditions, their Assumptionist and Resurrectionist priests, and the Euharistinki sisters who had been maintaining schools and charitable institutions in the old Uniat villages.
Bulgaria had formally been an independent state since 1878, but the Bulgarian Greek Catholic Church had not had a canonical structure within Bulgaria itself — its parishes had been organized under apostolic vicariates in what was now Greek or Turkish territory. The arrival of the refugee communities in Bulgaria proper created both a need and an opportunity: a need for pastoral care within Bulgaria, and an opportunity to create a canonical structure that could serve the surviving Greek Catholic community on Bulgarian soil.
The man who would create that structure arrived in Sofia in 1925. His name was Angelo Roncalli. He would spend nine formative years in Bulgaria. The country would shape him — and he would shape its church — more than almost any other experience of his long diplomatic and religious career.
Angelo Roncalli in Bulgaria: The Future Pope John XXIII and the Exarchate of 1926
Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli arrived in Sofia in 1925 as the Apostolic Visitator to Bulgaria — a relatively junior Vatican diplomat whose assignment to the Balkans was considered a backwater posting, far from the major centers of Catholic life. He was forty-four years old, a modest man of peasant origin from the Bergamo region of northern Italy, deeply rooted in the Italian Catholic tradition but genuinely open to what he would encounter.
What he encountered was a country of extraordinary religious complexity: Orthodox Bulgarians in the vast majority, a tiny Latin Catholic community in the Plovdiv and Danube Valley regions, a small Greek Catholic community of refugees and survivors, a Muslim minority that was still a significant social and political force, and a government that was trying to find its footing as a modern European state while navigating the treacherous waters of Balkan politics. The position came with both a mandate — to establish diplomatic relations between the Holy See and the Bulgarian government — and a pastoral challenge: to care for the scattered Greek Catholic community within Bulgaria's borders.
Roncalli threw himself into both tasks with the cheerful thoroughness that would become his hallmark. He traveled the country extensively, learning Bulgarian, establishing personal connections with Orthodox clergy and lay leaders as well as Catholic ones, and building an understanding of Bulgarian culture and history that few Vatican diplomats of his era possessed. He is said to have called his nine years in Bulgaria "the most vigorous ten years of my life" — a remark that speaks to how deeply the country had shaped him.
In 1926, Roncalli organized the establishment of the Apostolic Exarchate of Sofia — the canonical structure that would serve as the formal home of the Bulgarian Greek Catholic Church on Bulgarian territory. This was the church's first genuinely stable canonical organization since the collapse of the Uniat movement in the 1870s: a single jurisdiction, based in the Bulgarian capital, responsible for pastoral care of the Greek Catholic community within Bulgaria. Roncalli was named Apostolic Delegate (a step up from Visitator) in 1931 and remained in Bulgaria until 1934, when he was transferred to Turkey and Greece.
In 1934, he also supported the establishment of an inter-ritual seminary in Sofia, directed by the Jesuits, which would train clergy for the Greek Catholic community until it was closed in 1945 under Communist pressure. The seminary was an important step toward building the intellectual and spiritual infrastructure the Bulgarian Greek Catholic Church needed if it was to survive the coming storms.
Roncalli left Bulgaria in 1934. He never forgot it. When he was elected Pope as John XXIII in 1958, he explicitly recalled his Bulgarian experience on multiple occasions. The Bulgarian Communist government — despite its atheist ideology — recognized that his election as Pope represented an opportunity, given his warmth toward Bulgaria. Conditions for Bulgarian Catholics improved somewhat, which was not nothing: in a country where bishops had recently been executed, "somewhat better" mattered.
The ultimate honor to Roncalli's connection with Bulgaria came in 2019, when Pope Francis elevated the Apostolic Exarchate of Sofia to a full eparchy — and named it the Eparchy of Saint John XXIII of Sofia. The man who organized the church in the 1920s, who spent nine years learning Bulgarian and caring for its scattered Greek Catholics, is now the patron of the eparchy itself. It is one of the most graceful acts of institutional memory in the modern Catholic world.
Communist Persecution: The Show Trial of 1952 and Bulgaria's Martyrs
When the Soviet-backed Communist government took power in Bulgaria after September 1944, it inherited a playbook for dealing with religion that had been refined across the Soviet empire: destroy what you can, suppress what you can't destroy, control what you can't suppress. In Bulgaria, the Communist approach to Catholicism was particularly vicious in its early years — "nominally because Catholicism was considered the religion of fascism," as Wikipedia notes, but more fundamentally because the Catholic Church's connection to Rome represented an alternative source of loyalty and authority that the Communist state could not tolerate.
By April 1948, all Catholic bishops, including those of the Byzantine rite, had been arrested or driven underground. Church properties were confiscated. Public liturgical activities were prohibited. The interritual seminary that Roncalli had supported was closed in 1945. In 1948, the Apostolic Nuncio Francesco Galloni was expelled from Bulgaria. In 1949, the government deported or expelled all non-Bulgarian missionaries. Religious orders were abolished and their members dispersed.
The Communists attempted to create a "national" Catholic church — popeless, separated from Rome, controllable by the state. Bishop Bossilkov was explicitly offered the chance to head such a body. His refusal sealed his fate.
In summer 1952, the Communist regime launched mass arrests of Church leaders. Bishop Bossilkov and twenty-nine other clerics and prominent Catholic laypeople were arrested in mid-July. The state-controlled press announced they would be tried for crimes against the nation. The "show trial" opened in Sofia on September 29, 1952. International protests were immediate: Pope Pius XII denounced the "wave of terror." US President Harry Truman objected in the name of humanity. Cardinal Schuster of Milan compared the persecution to that of ancient pagan Rome. None of it mattered. The verdict was read on October 3. Four of the accused were condemned to death: Bishop Bossilkov and three Augustinian priests — Kamen Vitchev, Pavel Djidjov, and Josaphat Shishkov. They were executed by firing squad on the night of November 11, 1952, in the yard of the Central Sofia Prison. Their bodies were thrown into mass graves. Their locations were never revealed.
The Bulgarian Communist government concealed Bossilkov's death for twenty-three years. When the Bishop was not heard from, the government spread a rumor that he had been sent to Siberia as a prisoner — not executed. His fellow Catholics hoped, for decades, that he was still alive. The truth was not confirmed until 1975, when a Bulgarian minister visited the Vatican and Pope Paul VI asked directly what had happened to the bishop. The minister admitted that Bossilkov had died in prison twenty-three years earlier. Pope Paul VI had been asking about a man who had been dead almost since Paul's own episcopate began.
Blessed Eugene Bossilkov: The Bishop Who Chose Death Over Apostasy
Eugene Bossilkov was born Vincent Bossilkov on November 16, 1900, in Belene, Bulgaria, to a Latin-rite Catholic family — the Passionist Fathers had been serving in Bulgaria since 1781, and his family was part of that long tradition of Bulgarian Latin Catholicism in the Danube valley. At age eleven he entered the minor seminary. At age fourteen he was sent to study in Belgium, later in the Netherlands. He entered the Passionist Congregation in 1919, took the name Eugene, professed his vows in 1920, and was ordained a priest in 1926.
His intellectual formation was remarkable. In 1927 he went to Rome to take his doctorate at the Pontifical Oriental Institute — the Vatican's premier institution for Eastern Christian studies — where he wrote his thesis on "The Union of the Bulgarians with the Church of Rome at the Beginning of the 13th Century." He was, in other words, a man who had studied precisely the medieval Bulgarian-Roman connections that had given birth to the Bulgarian Greek Catholic tradition, who knew that history intimately, and who came back to Bulgaria with both a pastoral vocation and a deep scholarly understanding of what Bulgarian Catholic identity meant across the centuries.
He returned to Bulgaria and served as a parish priest in the Danube River valley, where he became known both as a scholar and as a pastor who was exceptional with young people. When Bishop Damian Theelen of Nicopolis died in 1946, Bossilkov was appointed administrator. On October 7, 1947, he was ordained Bishop of Nicopolis — the Latin-rite diocese covering the entire territory of Bulgaria north of the Balkan Mountains. He was now the most senior Catholic prelate in Bulgaria.
He knew exactly what awaited him. From 1949 the Communist government had been systematically destroying Catholic institutional life: seizing property, disbanding religious congregations, expelling foreign missionaries, arresting clergy. The Apostolic Delegate had been expelled in 1948. Bossilkov and the remaining clergy were leading a church under siege, trying to keep the faith alive in their communities with diminishing resources and under increasing surveillance.
When he was arrested in July 1952, the Communists offered him a way out: renounce communion with Rome, head the proposed national Catholic church free from the Pope, and live. His answer — preserved in the testimony of his niece, who visited him in prison — was unambiguous. When she relayed a friend's suggestion that he ask for mercy, he replied: "No. I feel the Lord has given me the grace to accept death. But take courage and never fear. Our Lady will never abandon you. Greet my brothers and all my friends, and tell them I have not betrayed the Church: nor the Holy Father, nor the Apostolic Delegate."
He was executed at 11:30 PM on November 11, 1952. His body was thrown into a mass grave and has never been found.
Pope John Paul II beatified Eugene Bossilkov on March 15, 1998 — the first martyr of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe to be beatified by the Catholic Church. Pope Pius XII had mentioned his execution in his 1952 encyclical Orientales Ecclesias to the Oriental Churches. Pope Paul VI had confirmed his death in 1975. Pope John Paul II had personally urged the cause forward, and the beatification took place in St. Peter's Basilica before a congregation that included Bulgarian government officials. His feast is November 13.
The Three Augustinian Martyrs: Vitchev, Djidjov, and Shishkov
Eugene Bossilkov was not the only martyr of November 11, 1952. Three Assumptionist (Augustinian) priests were executed with him on the same night, for the same fabricated charges. They were beatified by Pope John Paul II on May 26, 2002, during his visit to Plovdiv — the first papal visit to Bulgaria in history.
Blessed Kamen Vitchev (1893–1952)
Born Peter Vitchev in 1893 near Topolovgrad, Bulgaria, into an Eastern Orthodox family, he joined the Assumptionists in 1903 and took the religious name Kamen. He studied in Belgium and was ordained a priest of the Eastern Rite in Constantinople on December 22, 1921 — an Eastern rite ordination, making him specifically a Greek Catholic priest, the only one of the four martyrs ordained in the Byzantine tradition. He taught at Saint Augustine College in Plovdiv and worked extensively in the Greek Catholic communities of Bulgaria. He was arrested in the summer 1952 wave of arrests and executed with Bossilkov. His feast is November 11.
Blessed Pavel Djidjov (1919–1952)
Born in 1919, Pavel Djidjov was an Assumptionist priest who had been ordained only a few years before his arrest. The youngest of the four martyrs, he was executed at the age of thirty-three — the same age as Christ at the Crucifixion. His martyrdom represents the Communist regime's willingness to destroy even the youngest and newest clergy, not merely established leaders.
Blessed Josaphat Shishkov (1884–1952)
Born in 1884 in the Plovdiv region, Josaphat Shishkov had spent decades serving the Bulgarian Catholic community in Thrace and Bulgaria. An Assumptionist priest with long experience of the Macedonian and Thracian Greek Catholic communities, he had navigated the upheavals of the Balkan Wars and World War I. He was sixty-eight years old when he was executed — the eldest of the four martyrs, a man who had spent his entire adult life serving the Bulgarian Catholic mission.
Blessed Kamen Vitchev, Blessed Pavel Djidjov & Blessed Josaphat Shishkov
Three Assumptionist priests executed November 11, 1952, with Bishop Bossilkov. Beatified during Pope John Paul II's historic visit to Plovdiv — the first papal visit to Bulgaria in history. Their feast day is November 11, the anniversary of their martyrdom.
Eastern Rite and Latin Rite Martyrs Together
Of the four 1952 martyrs, only Kamen Vitchev was ordained specifically as a Greek Catholic (Eastern rite) priest. Bossilkov and the others were Latin-rite clergy. But all four died for the same faith, in the same show trial, under the same charges — and all four are now venerated together as martyrs of Bulgarian Catholicism in its fullness.
Icons for Devotion and Prayer
Byzantine Icons from the Living Tradition
From Communism to the Present: Recovery and Pope Francis
Unlike many Eastern Catholic churches under Communist rule — the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the Slovak Greek Catholic Church — the Bulgarian Greek Catholic Church was not formally abolished by the Communist government. This was unusual and significant. The church was subjected to severe restrictions, its leadership was imprisoned or killed, and its institutional life was nearly destroyed, but it retained a technical legal existence. This difference is attributed in part to Bulgaria's place within the Soviet sphere: Bulgarian Communism was somewhat more pragmatic in its approach to religion than the Soviet model in some respects, and the Greek Catholic church was simply too small to justify the political risks of formal suppression.
The death of Bossilkov and the three Augustinian priests effectively decapitated Catholic leadership in Bulgaria for years. The remaining clergy operated under constant surveillance and severe restrictions. When Pope John XXIII was elected in 1958 — the former Angelo Roncalli, who had known Bulgaria intimately from 1925 to 1934 — the Communist government recognized the personal connection as a potential diplomatic asset, and conditions for Bulgarian Catholics improved slightly. Bulgarian bishops were permitted to attend sessions of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, an exceptional circumstance for an Eastern European church under Communist control.
After the death of Bulgarian leader Zhivkov's minister visited the Vatican in 1975 and Bossilkov's death was confirmed, a new bishop was eventually ordained for the Latin-rite diocese of Nicopolis (Vasko Seirekov, 1975), and slowly the Catholic hierarchy was rebuilt. Full diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Bulgaria were reestablished on December 5, 1990, after the fall of Communism.
The restitution of church properties proceeded painfully slowly. By 1991, Bulgaria had enacted legislation addressing properties seized between 1948 and 1989, but the Greek Catholic community recovered only a small fraction of what had been taken. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church, which had received considerable property transfers during the Communist years, retained most of the assets even after the legislative change.
Pope John Paul II's visit to Bulgaria in May 2002 — the first papal visit in Bulgarian history — was both a diplomatic and a religious landmark. He celebrated the beatification of Vitchev, Djidjov, and Shishkov in Plovdiv, honoring the martyrs of 1952 on Bulgarian soil for the first time. During his homily, he also honored the memory of Orthodox Bulgarians who had suffered martyrdom under the same Communist regime — an ecumenical gesture of considerable delicacy in a country where the Orthodox Church remained the dominant religious institution.
Pope Francis and the Eparchy of Saint John XXIII (2019)
The most recent landmark in Bulgarian Greek Catholic history came on October 12, 2019, when Pope Francis elevated the Apostolic Exarchate of Sofia to the dignity of a full eparchy — naming it the Eparchy of Saint John XXIII of Sofia. The name was a deliberate tribute to Angelo Roncalli, whose nine years in Bulgaria as a young Vatican diplomat had established the institutional foundation of the modern church. By naming the eparchy after him, the Catholic Church was formally acknowledging the Bulgarian chapter of his life as foundational not only to his own formation but to the church he had helped build.
The elevation to eparchy status — the equivalent of a diocese in the Latin Church — gave the Bulgarian Greek Catholic Church greater institutional autonomy and a higher canonical standing. The current eparch is Bishop Petko Valov, who leads a community of approximately ten thousand faithful in twenty-one parishes. The cathedral church is the Cathedral of the Dormition of the Mother of God in Sofia.
The Church Today: The Eparchy of Saint John XXIII of Sofia
The Bulgarian Greek Catholic Church today is small in numbers but institutionally mature. It is one of the twenty-three Eastern Catholic sui iuris churches in full communion with the Holy See. Its single eparchy — the Eparchy of Saint John XXIII of Sofia — encompasses all the Greek Catholics in Bulgaria, served by approximately twenty diocesan and religious priests, with additional male and female religious.
The cathedral church, the Cathedral of the Dormition of the Mother of God in Sofia, is the liturgical and administrative center of the church. Services are celebrated in the Bulgarian language and in Church Slavonic according to the Byzantine Rite — the same liturgical tradition that Bulgaria received when Tsar Boris I accepted baptism from the Byzantine missionaries in 864 AD, now celebrated in full communion with Rome.
The community is concentrated primarily in Sofia and in the regions that historically had Greek Catholic populations: the Plovdiv area (where the descendants of Paulicians converted to Latin Catholicism in the 17th century exist alongside the Byzantine Catholics), the Danube valley, and in communities that trace their descent to the Macedonian and Thracian Greek Catholic villages of the 19th century. The church maintains strong ties with the diaspora communities of Bulgarians who have emigrated to Western Europe.
The church participates in the broader life of the Bulgarian Catholic community alongside the Latin-rite Church, which has two dioceses in Bulgaria (Sofia-Plovdiv and Nicopolis). The two traditions — Latin and Byzantine — cooperate in pastoral and educational work while maintaining their distinct liturgical identities.
The most significant recent challenge has been the ongoing difficulty of property restitution. Of the more than 2,600 churches and monasteries confiscated during the Communist period, the Greek Catholic community has recovered only a small fraction. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church, which retains most of the transferred properties, has generally been unwilling to return them, and the Bulgarian state has not moved aggressively to enforce its own restitution legislation.
The Liturgy: Byzantine Rite in the Bulgarian Language
The Bulgarian Greek Catholic Church celebrates the Byzantine Rite — the same Divine Liturgy celebrated across the Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic world — in the Bulgarian language and in Church Slavonic. This combination is distinctive and historically significant: the Bulgarian language in the liturgy represents the same impulse that drove the 19th-century Uniat movement, the desire to worship in one's own national tongue rather than in the Greek of an imposed hierarchy. Church Slavonic, the ancient sacred language of the Slavic Christian tradition, connects the liturgy to the legacy of Saints Cyril and Methodius and their disciples who brought the faith to Bulgaria in the 9th century.
| Feature | Bulgarian Greek Catholic Practice |
|---|---|
| Rite | Byzantine (Greek-Slavonic tradition) |
| Liturgical Languages | Bulgarian (national language) and Church Slavonic |
| Divine Liturgy | Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom (standard); Saint Basil (great feasts & Lent); Pre-Sanctified Gifts (Lent weekdays) |
| Eucharistic Bread | Leavened prosphora |
| Communion | Both kinds administered by spoon (intinction) |
| Clergy | Married men may be ordained to the priesthood; bishops celibate |
| Filioque | Not inserted in the Nicene Creed (preserving original text) |
| Calendar | Historically Julian; post-conciliar adaptations permit civil calendar alignment |
| Relationship with Rome | Full communion — recognizes papal primacy; governed by Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches (CCEO) |
| Cathedral | Cathedral of the Dormition of the Mother of God, Sofia |
| Saints | Saints Cyril and Methodius (May 11), Saints Clement and Naum of Ohrid, Blessed Eugene Bossilkov (Nov 13), Blessed Kamen Vitchev, Pavel Djidjov & Josaphat Shishkov (Nov 11) |
The Bulgarian Greek Catholic liturgy retains distinctly Eastern theological emphases: the epiclesis (the prayer invoking the Holy Spirit to transform the Eucharistic gifts) as the central consecration prayer; the deacon's dialogue with the celebrant throughout the liturgy; the iconostasis as the visual icon-screen separating nave from sanctuary; and a liturgical year oriented around the Resurrection (Pascha) as the central event of the Christian calendar. The Nicene Creed is prayed without the Filioque — the Western addition affirming that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son — maintaining the original Greek text of the creed in accordance with Eastern canonical tradition.
The Divine Liturgy in Bulgarian is celebrated with the warmth and depth of a tradition that began in the court of Tsar Boris I in 864 AD, that survived the Ottoman centuries in village churches and mountain monasteries, that was celebrated clandestinely in apartments and private homes during the Communist years, and that is celebrated openly today in the Cathedral of the Dormition in Sofia. It is, in the deepest sense, the same liturgy — the same prayer, the same mystery, the same face of Christ — that has defined Bulgarian Byzantine Christianity for over eleven centuries.
Bulgarian Greek Catholic Prayer Cards
The Eastern Church carries handcrafted prayer cards for the Bulgarian Greek Catholic tradition — saints whose lives intersect with the specific heritage documented in this article, made one at a time and prayed over throughout the creation process in Austin, Texas. If you are Bulgarian Greek Catholic, or if you are drawn to the Bulgarian Catholic heritage through this history, these cards are made for you.
Browse the complete collection of Bulgarian Greek Catholic prayer cards — including saints venerated across the Bulgarian Byzantine tradition — at The Eastern Church's dedicated Bulgarian Greek Catholic collection. Each card is $3, with bulk discounts for parishes.
Free Christian Marriage Books — The Eastern Tradition on Love, Prayer, and Family
The Bulgarian Greek Catholic Church's story is, in many ways, the story of families keeping faith alive across generations — under Ottoman rule, under Hellenization, under Communist suppression. The Eastern Christian tradition on marriage is one of the most profound in all of Christianity: a theology that sees the married couple as a small church, two people who pray each other into holiness. Read every book completely free, no email or paywall required.
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A Church That Chose Both Its Heritage and Its Faith
The Bulgarian Greek Catholic Church chose something rare and costly: to be Byzantine and Catholic at the same time, in full and genuine expression of both. It was founded by nationalists who became something more than nationalists. It was organized by a future Pope. It was watered by the blood of martyrs. It stands today in Sofia, small but unconquered, the heir of Boris I and Cyril and Methodius and Sokolsky and Bossilkov and Roncalli — eleven centuries of Byzantine Christianity in communion with Rome.
Browse Bulgarian Greek Catholic Prayer Cards →