Page "Bulgarians" Paragraph 27

Most Bulgarians are at least nominally members of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church founded in 870 AD ( autocephalous since 927 AD ).

The Bulgarian Orthodox Church is the independent national church of Bulgaria like the other national branches of the Orthodox communion and is considered an inseparable element of Bulgarian national consciousness.

The church was abolished once, during the period of Ottoman rule ( 1396 — 1878 ), in 1873 it was revived as Bulgarian Exarchate and soon after raised again to Bulgarian Patriarchate.

In 2001, the Orthodox Church at least nominally had a total of 6, 552, 000 members in Bulgaria ( 82. 6 % of the population ), 6, 300, 000 of which were Bulgarians, and between one and two million members in the diaspora.

The Orthodox Bulgarian minorities in the Republic of Macedonia, Serbia, Greece, Albania, Ukraine and Moldova nowadays hold allegiance to the respective national Orthodox churches.