Alexander Schmemann

5. The Dark Ages (16 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 7

Greek Control of Outlying Orthodox Areas.

When they received this power, not only ecclesiastical but national as well, the like of which they had not had in the last centuries of the empire, the Byzantine patriarchs did everything they could to establish permanently the triumph of the Greeks over all the Slavic minorities they had previously been forced to recognize.
The Turkish period is marked by disgraceful internal struggle within the Orthodox rayah itself — and for what cause? Because of that same passionate nationalism which was stifling the awareness of the unity of the Church of Christ more and more with each century. Unfortunately, the Turkish concept of religion had long ago become the Christian concept as well.

The Christians painlessly and without embarrassment accepted the prohibition against converting Moslems, thus rejecting the universal calling of the Church; but they expended great effort — aided by the Moslems — in humiliating, subjugating, and subduing their own brothers in the faith. Themselves humiliated, exiled, and killed — so frequently only pawns in the hands of the Phanariots, Greeks who had grown rich in Turkish service — the patriarchs of Constantinople systematically endeavored not only to subdue all the Slavic churches which had previously been autocephalic, but also to make them Greek, eliminating any memory of their Slavic past.

The patriarchate of Trnovo was eliminated almost immediately after the Turkish conquest of Bulgaria. As early as 1394 a Greek metropolitan had been sent from Constantinople, and the patriarchate was changed into a division of the patriarchate of Constantinople. The other independent Bulgarian eparchy of Ochrida, established in 1018 when the Greeks destroyed the first Bulgarian kingdom, lasted until 1776, when the celebrated patriarch of Constantinople, Samuel I, completed the “unification” of the Orthodox Church. The year before he had succeeded in eliminating the Serbian patriarchate at Pech by paying its debts to the Turkish treasury.
Everywhere former bishops who were native Bulgars and Serbs were deposed and replaced by Greeks. This canonical abuse of power was accompanied by forced “Grecizing,” particularly in Bulgaria, where it later served as the basis of the so-called Bulgarian question.

 

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