No other Orthodox church has been raised to a patriarchate, reduced, and raised again as many times as Bulgaria's. Knyaz Boris I accepted Christianity in 864 and, more consequentially, gave refuge to the disciples of Cyril and Methodius after their expulsion from Moravia, building the church on Slavonic rather than Greek foundations from the start. That investment paid off within a generation: after Tsar Simeon I's wars against Byzantium ended in a peace treaty, Constantinople recognized Bulgarian autocephaly and raised the church to a Patriarchate in 927, the first Slavic church to hold that rank.
It did not last. The Byzantine reconquest of Bulgaria in 1018 reduced the see to the Archbishopric of Ohrid, autonomous but not patriarchal, and the Ottomans abolished even that in 1767, folding its dioceses into the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. A second attempt fared little better: the Second Bulgarian Empire's church governed itself from 1186, and Constantinople recognized it as the Tarnovo Patriarchate in 1235, only for the Ottoman conquest of Tarnovo in 1393 to end it along with the empire that hosted it.
The modern church's path to its present standing ran through a schism of its own making. An 1870 Ottoman decree created the Bulgarian Exarchate as a distinct millet defined by language rather than by diocese, and the Ecumenical Patriarchate, reading that as an intrusion on its own territorial jurisdiction, declared it schismatic in 1872. The rift outlasted the Ottoman Empire itself and was not lifted until 1945. The Holy Synod restored the Patriarchate on 10 May 1953, a Third Patriarchate in the church's own reckoning, and Constantinople recognized it in 1961. Patriarch Daniil, elected in 2024, marked the restoration's seventy-third anniversary in 2026 by calling the date a measure of "the maturity of the respective local church," a description that fits an institution that has now outlasted three different downfalls.