lavs had become Christians, and some of the Bulgars also adopted
the new faith. For a time the kings tried to crush out Christianity by
persecutions, but in 864 the Bulgarian King, Boris, adopted
Christianity--some say converted by his sister, who had been a prisoner
of the Greeks and was baptized by them. His adherence to Christianity
was announced in a treaty with the Greek Emperor, Michael III. Some of
King Boris's subjects kept their affection for paganism and objected to
the conversion of their king. Following the customs of the time they
were all massacred, and Bulgaria became thus a wholly Christian kingdom.

King Boris, whom the Bulgarians look up to as the actual founder of the
Bulgarian nation of to-day, hesitated long as to whether he should
attach himself and his nation to the Roman or to the Greek branch of
the Christian Church. He made the issue a matter of close bargaining.
The Church was sought which was willing to allow to Bulgaria the highest
degree of ecclesiastical independence, and which seemed to offer as the
price of adhesion the greatest degree of political advantage.

[Illustration: ANCIENT COSTUME OF BALKAN PEASANT WOMEN NEAR GABROVO]

At first the Greek Church would not allow Bulgaria to have a Patriarch
of her own. King Boris sent, then, a deputation to Pope Nicholas at
Rome, seeking if a better national bargain could be made there. Two
bishops came over from Rome to negotiate. But in time King Boris veered
back to a policy of attaching himself to the Greek Church, which now
offered Bulgaria an Archbishop with a rank in the Church second only to
that of the Greek Patriarch. In 869 Bulgaria definitely threw in her lot
with the Greek Church.

Curiously those old religious controversies of the ninth century were
revived in the nineteenth. Bulgaria has a persistent sense of
nationalism, and looks upon religion largely in a national sense. In the
ninth century her first care in changing her religion was to safeguard
national interests. In the nineteenth century the first great
concession she wrung from her Turkish masters was the setting up (1870)
of a Bulgarian Exarch to be the official head of the Bulgarian Orthodox
Church independent of the Greek Patriarch. A little later in the days of
her freedom, when to her Roman Catholic ruler, King Ferdinand, was born
a son (named Boris after the first Christian king of Bulgaria), the
Bulgarians had him transferred in 1896 from the Roman to the Greek
C