The Bulgarian Orthodox Church governs itself from Saint Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Sofia, where Patriarch Daniil, elected in 2024 and titled Metropolitan of Sofia, presides over a Holy Synod of diocesan bishops. Thirteen dioceses cover Bulgaria itself, with two further dioceses serving diaspora communities across Western and Central Europe, the Americas and Australia, roughly 2,600 parishes in total. Services are conducted in Church Slavonic, the liturgical language the church's ninth century founders built from Cyril and Methodius's translation work, alongside a growing modern Bulgarian vernacular.
The most visible fault line in the church today is not doctrinal but calendrical. In 1968 the Holy Synod adopted the Revised Julian calendar for fixed feasts, realigning them with the Gregorian dates most of Europe already used, while keeping the traditional Julian paschalion for Easter and its dependent moveable feasts, the same split most other Eastern Orthodox churches follow. A minority read the change as, in their own words, "a betrayal of Orthodox tradition and an unwarranted compromise with modernism," and broke away as the Old Calendar Orthodox Church of Bulgaria, a small body that today holds eighteen church buildings and two monasteries and keeps New Year on 14 January. Bulgaria's Supreme Court formally registered that body on 16 December 2024, a decision Patriarch Daniil called uncanonical, on the ground that "the Orthodox Church can only be one."
On membership the church's own count and outside survey research diverge in scope rather than in kind. Pew Research's 2017 report on Orthodox Christianity found 81 percent of Bulgaria's population, more than six million people on 2015 figures, self-identifying as Orthodox Christian; the church's own figure of 7 to 8 million folds in the diaspora eparchies that a national survey of Bulgaria alone could never count.