A brief sketch of the history of the Orthodox churches of the Bulgarian, Serbian and Romanian or Moldo-Wallachian

In printing this book, we do not consider it necessary to dwell on the motives that forced us to undertake its compilation. Of course, no one will dispute the fairness of the fact that it does not hinder us, Russians, to have some acquaintance, among other things, with the church history of the Southern Orthodox Slavs and the Orthodox Romanians who are, as it were, an addition to them. And so the goal that we had in mind was to satisfy, at least to some extent, the need that has long been felt in such a book. For the convenience of readers, we have preceded the church history of each nation with a brief overview of state histories, which cost us considerable trouble and in which we tried to be as thorough and accurate as possible. We are afraid that our book will unpleasantly deceive the expectations of some of our readers: instead of a complete church history, they will find in it only a part of this latter, namely, only what is called external history. We ourselves would like to write something more complete than what we present; but, unfortunately, there is nothing to write about yet. The Bulgarian chronicles are still completely unknown; Although there are Serbian chronicles, they are only later ones, extremely brief and almost useless for anything, so we mainly have to talk about both peoples from foreign sources - from the Byzantines. Due to the absence and unsuitability of chronicles, what remains are the so-called historical acts, that is, various kinds of official documents and records; but less than a dozen Bulgarian acts have been opened so far; Although quite a few Serbian acts have been published, they are still only those that add very little to church history. We had a desire to read all the new studies and books on our subject; but the desire turned out to be impossible to fulfill. Relations with the Slavs (and Greeks), with whom we, apparently, should be in the most lively communication, are still fraught with the greatest difficulties for us. As a result of this, we could not order some books from abroad, which probably would not have been useless to us, despite any efforts. When talking about the shortcomings of the book that were not our fault, we do not at all want to think that it was free from shortcomings that were also our responsibility. Oblivion, according to the old expression, boasts over all people, and therefore it is very possible that in the book there will be quite a few oversights, omissions and real, small and large, errors. Since we do not intend to end our work on the history of all three churches, but intend to continue it in the future, we turn to specialists with a request to point out to us all kinds of shortcomings, and we promise to use them with full gratitude in our further work. We allow ourselves to think that our book will not be completely useless for Bulgarians, Serbs and Romanians. But in any case, we ask them not to forget that it was written mainly not for them, but specifically for the Russians, and that, for various good reasons, they do not have the right to be as demanding as towards their own writer. We wanted to include an ethnographic map with the book; but, unfortunately, this has turned out to be impossible for us at the present time. Since, due to the remoteness of our lives from the place of the printing house and due to eye disease, we could not keep the proofs ourselves, during printing, despite all the conscientious and diligent efforts of the proofreader, a number of typos crept in. Before reading the book, please correct them; We also ask you to first note those amendments and additions that were made at the end of the book. Sergiev Posad. M.D.A. April 25 1871. You might be interested in: