📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Thursday 15 October
He took his monastic name at Troyan Monastery, taught church singing and conducted choirs for years before he ever led a church of some six million members. Patriarch Neophyte (Неофит, neh-o-FEET), born Simeon Dimitrov on this day in 1945, was a choirmaster first.
What happened on this day
Simeon Dimitrov was born in Sofia into a working-class, non-party and strongly religious family, and his brother Dimitar became chief conductor of the choir at the Alexander Nevsky memorial church. He entered the seminary at Cherepish in 1959, graduated from the Theological Academy in 1971, then spent two years specialising in church chant in Moscow. From 1973 he taught Eastern church singing and conducted the academy's student choir, and on 3 August 1975 he took monastic vows at Troyan Monastery as Neophyte. He became a bishop in 1985, rector of the academy in 1989 and first dean of its restored Faculty of Theology at Sofia University in 1991, and during the schism in the Church he played an important part in the talks to free the occupied Synod building. He was metropolitan of Dorostol and Cherven from 1994 and of Ruse from 2001.
Wikipedia does not skip the awkward part: both the Bulgarian and English entries record that between 1983 and 1990 he was a collaborator of State Security's Sixth Directorate, part of the communist secret police, under the code name Simeonov, and that 16 pages of his file survive. He was elected Patriarch on 24 February 2013, winning 90 votes to the 47 cast for Gabriel of Lovech. In 2014 the prime minister handed him the title deed to Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, which until then had been state property, and in 2019 he met Pope Francis during the pope's visit to Bulgaria. He died on 13 March 2024 in a Sofia hospital, aged 78. The government announced a two-day period of mourning, and after the funeral liturgy in the cathedral a service led by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew preceded his burial at St Nedelya beside Exarch Joseph I.
Why this matters for British expats
You will meet this Church long before you meet its patriarch, who is roughly its public face, a little like the Archbishop of Canterbury for England. It counts roughly six million members inside Bulgaria, and its patriarchal seat, Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Sofia, is one of the city's main sights: built mostly between 1904 and 1912 in honour of the Russian soldiers who died in the war of 1877 and 1878 that freed Bulgaria, it can hold 5,000 worshippers and was renamed for Cyril and Methodius from 1916 to 1920, because Bulgaria and Russia were on opposite sides in the First World War. Dress modestly if you visit. The funeral liturgy was led by Metropolitan Ioan of Varna and Veliki Preslav, whose title includes the medieval capital in our own Shumen Province, so if you live in Shumen the Church's top table is closer to home than you might think.
Sources and further reading
The biography comes from the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on Patriarch Neophyte and the English entry, the cathedral from English Wikipedia's page on the building, and the Church's size from its English Wikipedia page. The position of Veliki Preslav in Shumen Province comes from its English Wikipedia page.