How to read this
This page is not a theological statement and nobody approved it. It was written by people who grew up with an icon in the corner of the room and were later told there was no place for them in that room.
It does two things, in this order, and the order matters. First it tells you honestly what the Bulgarian Orthodox Church has publicly declared about people like you — with dates, with quotations, unsoftened. Only then does it tell you the rest. A page that skips the bad news has not earned the right to hand you the good.
We are not going to talk you into believing. If you are an atheist, that is entirely fine and the second-to-last section is for you. But if you miss your faith and left it at the door because you were told that is how it works — this page says it does not work that way.
What "verified" means on this page
Every verse is copied word for word from the Synodal edition (Holy Synod, Sofia 1992), including the words that hurt. Every church statement comes from that institution's own site with its own date. Where scholars disagree — and for half of these texts they genuinely do — the page says they disagree. Where we could not find the Bulgarian text, it says that too.
What the Church says
We start with the worst of it, because that is the only honest order.
The Bulgarian Orthodox Church has a public position on this and it is not in your favour. It is not ambiguous, not old, and not "one stray priest". These are official statements of the Holy Synod, published on its own website, the most recent from the summer of 2026.
If you came here hoping somebody would tell you it has all been a misunderstanding — it has not. Here is the record.
The record, with dates
Everything in this list is public, issued by the institution itself or by the state news agency, and each is linked in the sources below.
- 2009
The first Pride
The Holy Synod opposes the 27 June march in Sofia outright, calls on the authorities to ban it, and urges people not to take part in what it calls the barren deeds of darkness.
- 22.01.2018
The Istanbul Convention
The Synod, signed by Patriarch Neophyte, calls on parliament not to ratify. The core objection is to the word "gender": sex is "biologically determined — man and woman". The text warns that adoption throws wide the doors of moral decay, leading to "the second death", the spiritual one.
- 30.11.2023
Same-sex cohabitation
A statement adopted at the session of 22 November: "Marriage and the family, understood as a union between a man and a woman blessed by God, are a centuries-old inviolable value for Christianity." And directly: "Same-sex cohabitation can find no place in this context, since it is unnatural, sinful, and cannot serve the continuation of the human race."
- 30.06.2024
A new patriarch
The electoral council elects Metropolitan Daniil of Vidin as Patriarch. In interviews he states that the Church "does not stigmatise people and rejects nobody, because every person is precious before God" — a formulation that concedes nothing doctrinally, but is also not the same thing as hostility.
- 08.08.2024
The schools law
After parliament bans "propaganda" of non-traditional sexual orientation in pre-school and school education, the Holy Synod issues a message expressing its gratitude to the members of parliament and stating: "We are satisfied with the statutory prohibition…"
- 13.06.2026
Sofia Pride 2026
The Synod publishes a position disapproving of the event's ideas and messages. The same text also contains this: the Church "invariably testifies to God's love for every person". That same day Patriarch Daniil leads the sixth March for the Family from St Nedelya church to the Alexander Nevsky cathedral.
What the teaching actually condemns
In the Orthodox formulation the condemnation is aimed at the act, not the person. Foundational Bulgarian church material states that Scripture and the Church's teaching condemn same-sex sexual relations as a vicious distortion of the human nature God created. The pan-Orthodox statement of the canonical bishops is just as short: the Church cannot and will not bless same-sex unions.
That distinction — the act, not the person — may sound to you like a lawyer's trick. It is often used as one. But it has a second consequence almost nobody says out loud: under no teaching of this Church are you outside it for what you are. Your baptism is not annulled. You are not barred from entering a church. No ecclesiastical act exists that expels you, and no priest has the authority to invent one.
So the institution tells you no about marriage and about a blessing. It does not tell you to get out.
Is there any other voice in Orthodoxy at all
A few, quiet, and almost entirely outside Bulgaria — but yes.
Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, whose book introduced half the world to Orthodoxy, acknowledged in a 2018 foreword in The Wheel that the Church has a hard question to face, and named several anomalies in how it currently treats homosexual people. In November 2014 Fr Robert Arida published an essay on the official website of the Orthodox Church in America arguing that the Church can no longer ignore or merely condemn the questions that appear to contradict its living tradition; after a flood of complaints the essay was taken down and a Houston clergy association issued a rebuttal. In July 2022 Archbishop Elpidophoros baptised the two children of a same-sex couple at a church in Vouliagmeni near Athens, to an uproar across Greek Orthodoxy.
None of that is approval and it should not be sold as such. These are people who said "let us talk about it" and paid for saying so. That is all. But it is worth knowing, because "nobody in Orthodoxy has ever raised the question" is simply untrue.
The Synod is not God
This distinction carries the whole page, and it is not our invention — the Church teaches that the distinction exists.
The Holy Synod is an assembly of living people. The people in it get things wrong, sometimes for a long time. This same institution has anathematised, excommunicated and then reinstated; it has fought wars over letters in a calendar; it was split in two by its own schism in the nineties. No Orthodox teaching claims that one synod's opinion in one decade is God.
And in 1943 this same Synod did something worth reading before you decide what you think of it. We will get there.
Until then: if somebody tells you God hates you, they have told you something about themselves. They have not delivered a message.
The Church may have thrown you out. God has not thrown you out.
The six verses
These are the texts people shoot with. We print them in full, from the Synodal edition, uncut — including the words that make you close your phone. If they were ever read at you out loud, you have a right to see them written down rather than retold in a safe version.
The verses below are given as the Bulgarian Synodal Bible has them, rendered literally into English, because the Bulgarian words are what the argument is actually about.
After each one: what it is used to claim, and what is known about the text itself. Not to explain it to you, but so that you have what the other side has — context, original words, the history of the translation.
Leviticus 18:22
"And you shall not lie with a man as with a woman: it is an abomination."
Used to say: God forbids homosexuality outright, in one line, and there is nothing more to discuss.
What the text holds:
The word translated "abomination" is the Hebrew תּוֹעֵבָה (to'evah). It does not mean "intrinsically evil" so much as "unclean, unfitting, foreign to us" — and it is used of things no church today treats as mortal sin. Deuteronomy 25:16 calls dishonest weights a to'evah.
The Hebrew construction is literally "the lyings of a woman" (mishkevei ishah) and scholars have argued for decades about what exactly it covers. Saul Olyan (Journal of the History of Sexuality, 1994) reads it as one specific act between two men; Jerome Walsh (Journal of Biblical Literature, 2001) published a whole article titled "Who Is Doing What to Whom?", because the text does not answer that question cleanly.
And the most awkward part for whoever is reading the verse at you: the same chapter and the two after it forbid dozens of other things with identical force. No Bulgarian church refuses communion over a wool-and-linen garment, or over shellfish.
This does not "cancel" the verse and no serious scholar claims it does. It means the verse sits inside a body of law that every church has already decided to read selectively — and that choosing which lines stay literal is a human choice, made by humans.
Leviticus 20:13
"And if anyone lies with a man as one lies with a woman, the two have committed an abomination; they shall surely die; their blood shall be upon them."
Used to say: Even the penalty is written down. So it must be serious.
What the text holds:
Yes, it is written down. The same body of law prescribes death for anyone who curses their father or mother (Leviticus 20:9).
Anyone quoting this verse as still binding owes an explanation of why they do not want the neighbouring one enforced. They are usually not asked.
Genesis 19 — Sodom
We do not print this one verbatim: we could not open the Bulgarian Synodal text of Genesis in readable form, and we will not quote you something we have not seen with our own eyes. The content: a crowd of men surrounds Lot's house and demands that his guests be brought out to them.
Used to say: An entire city was wiped off the earth for homosexuality. That is where the word "sodomy" comes from.
What the text holds:
What the crowd demands is the gang rape of guests under a roof — not a relationship. Any reading that walks past that is reading something other than the text.
The Bible answers the question itself. Ezekiel 16:49: "Only this was the sin of your sister Sodom: arrogance! She and her daughters had plenty of bread and untroubled tranquility; yet she did not support the poor and the needy." Pride, excess, indifference to the poor.
The word "sodomy" is not biblical. It is a later legal and ecclesiastical construction, named after the city retroactively.
Honest to the end: the next verse, Ezekiel 16:50, adds that "in their haughtiness, they committed abomination before Me" — using exactly the same word, to'evah. So the argument that "Sodom was only about inhospitality" is weaker than it is usually presented. Ezekiel gives a list in which cruelty to the poor comes first, not alone. We quote Ezekiel from the Hebrew and the JPS translation, because we could not find the Bulgarian Synodal text of that book online.
Romans 1:26–27
"Therefore God gave them up to shameful passions: their women exchanged the natural use for the unnatural; and the men likewise, having left the natural use of the female sex, burned with lust for one another, and men committed shameful acts with men, and so received in themselves the recompense that befitted their error."
Used to say: Paul says it in the New Testament, so this is not old law, it is Christianity.
What the text holds:
The load-bearing words are "exchanged" and "having left". The whole passage is about people who abandoned something of their own. That is the logic of Romans 1: a description of idolatry in which people abandon the knowledge of God and then abandon everything else.
Which raises the oldest possible question about this text: is Paul describing a person born this way, or a person who abandons what was theirs? James Miller (Novum Testamentum, 1995) argues it is the latter. Sarah Ruden ("Paul Among the People", 2010) reads the same passage against a Roman world in which sex between men was almost always master and slave, or adult and boy — violence with a social label on it.
And the structural point that matters most: chapter 1 is bait. Paul lists other people's sins, the audience nods along — and in chapter 2, verse 1 he turns on that same audience: you who judge do the same things. The passage is a trap for the person judging. It gets used the exact wrong way round.
In 1986 Richard Hays published in the Journal of Religious Ethics the most serious rebuttal of the affirming reading of Romans 1, and it remains serious. If somebody tells you the question is settled in your favour, they are simplifying too.
1 Corinthians 6:9–10
"Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not deceive yourselves: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor malakiytsi, nor muzhelozhnitsi, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God."
Used to say: There it is in black and white: gay people do not get in.
What the text holds:
The two Bulgarian words are „малакийци“ and „мъжеложници“ — literally "soft ones" and "men-liers". In the Greek they are μαλακοί (malakoi) and ἀρσενοκοῖται (arsenokoitai), and this is where the entire argument lives.
μαλακοί literally means "soft". In Greek literature it is used of the spoiled, the self-indulgent, the spineless. Dale Martin ("Arsenokoites and Malakos", in Robert Brawley's 1996 collection) argues it is dangerous to push past a general "effeminate".
ἀρσενοκοῖται is harder still: it is not attested in any text before Paul. He either built it himself or picked up a rare phrase. David Bentley Hart, in his 2017 translation of the New Testament, renders it "men who couple with catamites" and explains in a footnote that translating it "homosexuals" is an anachronism — the concept of an orientation simply did not exist in that world.
In the earliest non-biblical uses, arsenokoitai turns up alongside economic offences — fraud, extortion — which leads some scholars to read it as coercive exploitation rather than "two men in a relationship".
The other side has a real argument. The major Greek lexicons (BDAG) give arsenokoitēs as "a male who engages in sexual activity with a person of his own sex", and Robert Gagnon's "The Bible and Homosexual Practice" (Abingdon, 2001) — the most thorough conservative study of the subject — defends the traditional reading at length. The dispute is real and it is not settled.
1 Timothy 1:9–10
"…knowing that the law is laid down not for the righteous but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unrighteous and profane, for those who abuse their father and mother, for murderers, for fornicators, muzhelozhtsi, robbers, slanderers, those who lie with beasts, liars, perjurers, and for everything else contrary to sound teaching…"
Used to say: Another list. In it again.
What the text holds:
The same word, the same translation problem. And the same kind of list: this is an orderly enumeration of crimes that includes people who murder their parents and people who steal human beings.
If this verse is read as a verdict on a quiet person who loves another quiet person, the reading has lost the scale.
The word "homosexual" entered the Bible in 1946
That is not a figure of speech. No word for "homosexual" existed in any language the Bible was written in, because the concept did not exist. In English the word first appears in 1892, in C. G. Chaddock's translation of Krafft-Ebing's "Psychopathia Sexualis". The Bible was about eighteen centuries old by then.
So somebody put it in at some point. Here is when.
- 1611
The King James Version renders the two Greek words of 1 Cor 6:9 as "nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind". Two separate things, and no name for a kind of person.
- 1946
The New Testament of the Revised Standard Version fuses the two words into one: "homosexuals". The first time that word entered an English Bible.
- 22.10.1959
A twenty-one-year-old divinity student in Montreal, David S. Fearon, sends a five-page letter to Dr Luther Weigle, chair of the translation committee, challenging exactly that choice. The correspondence sits in the Yale archives alongside the committee's own records.
- 1971
The second edition of the RSV drops "homosexuals" and puts "sexual perverts" in its place. The committee did not go back, but it did not hold its ground either — and no other English translation took up the new wording.
- today
The Bulgarian Synodal text has never used the word "homosexual" in these verses. It says „малакийци“ and „мъжеложници“ — old words for old things. Which means the Bulgarian reader was sold the translation and the argument about it in one package, ready-made.
How far this argument goes — and where it stops
The 1946 story often gets told as "one translation error created the whole hostility". That is far too convenient and it does not hold. Conservative critics point out, quite fairly, that pre-1946 translations already said something close with different words, and that the major lexicons are not on the affirming side. Sharon Roggio's 2022 documentary "1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture" has drawn serious objections on several of its claims.
Second: the argument that adelphopoiesis — the Orthodox rite of "brother-making" — was a wedding for same-sex couples comes from John Boswell (1994) and is rejected by nearly all Byzantine scholarship. Brent Shaw showed how anachronistic his readings were. The Greek Church translates the rite as "fraternisation", and that is what it historically was. If somebody hands it to you as established fact, they are handing you a wish.
Third, and most honestly: nothing in this section proves that the Church will change its teaching, or that it must. The aim of the text is more modest and more important. If someone tells you the question is closed, you now know that it is not — and a person for whom the question is not closed has every right to stand in a church while it is being settled.
And one detail we love: Richard Hays, author of the strongest scholarly objection back in 1986, published a book with his son in 2024 changing his position. It can take thirty-eight years. It can also happen.
What else is in the same book
Six verses out of more than thirty-one thousand. Here are some of the others, verbatim, from the same edition.
Not to collect "our" verses against "theirs". So that you can see that the book being used to hit you contains this as well.
"Judge not, that you be not judged; for with what judgement you judge, with that you shall be judged; and with what measure you measure, with that it shall be measured to you."
"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law? And Jesus answered him: love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind: this is the first and greatest commandment; and the second, like it, is: love your neighbour as yourself; on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."
"…for there are eunuchs who were born so from their mother's womb; and there are eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men; and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven."
"And as they went along the road they came to some water; and the eunuch said: here is water; what prevents me from being baptised? And Philip said to him: if you believe with all your heart, you may be baptised… and they both went down into the water, Philip and the eunuch; and he baptised him."
"Who are you to judge another man's servant? Before his own Master he stands, or falls. And he shall be upheld, for God is able to uphold him."
"If anyone says, 'I love God', and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen?"
God is love — and that is a definition, not a compliment
1 John 4:8 is perhaps the shortest claim about God's nature in the Bible: "he who does not love has not known God, for God is love." Verse 16 repeats it: "God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him."
In Orthodox theology this is not a poetic image. It is an ontological claim — about what God is. And it has an immediate consequence: where there is real love, there is God. Not "there may be". There is.
Add verse 18: "In love there is no fear, but perfect love drives out fear, because in fear there is torment." If your faith is mostly fear — of being found out, of punishment, of being defective — that verse says what you have is not faith. It is torment. And that it is not from God.
And the last thing, which Orthodoxy holds harder than almost anything: every person bears the image of God. Not some people. Not the righteous. Every one. If that is true of you — and under this teaching it is — then there is something on you that no synod, no priest and no relative has the authority to take off.
1943: when the Church stood in front of the trains
If you have read this far and still wonder why anyone would argue you should not give this Church up, here is the answer. There is one, and it is very strong.
In March 1943 the Bulgarian state, an ally of Hitler, was preparing to load its own citizens into railway cars. What stood in the way was not an army and not foreign pressure. Part of it was the Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church — the same institution whose statements you read above.
- 09.03.1943
Plovdiv, the yard of the Jewish school
Overnight the Jews of Plovdiv are gathered for deportation. Metropolitan Kiril of Plovdiv comes to the detainees and tells them: "I shall not allow a single one of you to leave Plovdiv. Wherever you go, I go too!" He sends a telegram to Tsar Boris III begging mercy, and declares that if they are loaded into the cars he will lie down in front of the train. The order is cancelled.
- 11.03.1943
Elsewhere, the same week
Bulgarian military and police authorities hand 11,343 Jews from Aegean Thrace, Vardar Macedonia and Pirot over to German custody. The transports leave Skopje on 22, 25 and 29 March. Almost all are killed at Treblinka on arrival.
- 17.03.1943
The petition
Dimitar Peshev, deputy speaker of the National Assembly, drafts a letter of protest to Prime Minister Bogdan Filov. Within two days another 42 MPs sign it — all from the governing majority, because Peshev did not want it read as an anti-government act. On 26 March he is removed from his post.
- 22.03.1943
The Synod, in plenary session
The Church issues an official plea. In its protest the Synod states that God's law, which stands above all human laws, unequivocally obliges them not to be indifferent before the sufferings of innocent people, of whatever race, and that the Church cannot deny help and protection to the persecuted.
- 02.04.1943
The Metropolitan of Sofia asks the state to its face
At a session in Sofia, Metropolitan Stefan sums the situation up: when we ask the state authorities what the Jews of this country are guilty of, they have nothing to say; they took everything from the Jews, and when they came for their lives the Jews asked the Church to defend them. Already in April 1942 he had written in his diary that only madmen could fall for the hysteria of that miserable Führer, and that September he preached openly against antisemitism and said Bulgarians should consider the Jews their brothers.
- 24.05.1943
The pulpit of St Nedelya
Metropolitan Stefan declares from the pulpit that he will pronounce anathema from that very pulpit on anyone who lays a hand on a Bulgarian Jew. The same day he writes to the Tsar: "Do not persecute, if you do not wish to be persecuted. With what measure you deal out, with that it shall be dealt to you. Remember, Boris, God watches your deeds from heaven." He also shelters Sofia's chief rabbi, Daniel Zion, in his own house.
And the part that must not be skipped
"Bulgaria saved its Jews" is true and incomplete, and in a case like this an incomplete account is a kind of lie.
11,343 people were not saved. They were rounded up, loaded and handed over by Bulgarian military and police authorities — not German ones. They lived on land Bulgaria administered but had not given them citizenship, and that is precisely what made them available to hand over. The archives disagree on the detail: the commissariat reports give 11,362, Belev's report 11,357. The difference is a few lines of bookkeeping. The people are the same people.
Menachem Rosensaft puts the only honest way to hold both at once: both sides of the ledger must be read, and they must not be uncoupled. Tsar Boris III has not been named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem — precisely because he is both.
If this page had handed you only the heroic half, you would have had no reason to believe anything else on it.
Why this is here
Not to tell you the Church is good. You read above what it declares about you.
But because 1943 establishes something no statement can repeal: this specific institution, in this specific language, has already decided this exact question once. The state was against a minority. The Church had the option of silence — as churches across Europe took it — and did not take it. Its position then was that God's law stands above human law, and that indifference to the suffering of innocent people, of whatever race, is not permitted.
That is its own principle, spoken by its own Synod, at its own best moment. You do not need to invent it. You only need to remind them of it.
And the next time somebody tells you that to be Bulgarian and Christian you have to be against someone — know that the most Christian thing Bulgaria did in the twentieth century was the exact opposite.
How to walk in
Enough theory. Say you want to walk into a church tomorrow. Here is what actually happens and what does not.
This is written for someone who has not been since childhood, or has never been, and is afraid somebody will read something off their face.
You just walk in.
Nobody stops you at the door and nobody asks anything. An Orthodox church is open to walk into while it is open. No registration, no membership, no conversation, no list.
You buy a candle, if you want to.
They are by the entrance and they cost small change. The lower stand is for the living, the upper one for the dead. If you get the order wrong nobody will say a word. The candle is not an exam.
You stay as long as you decided to.
You can stay five minutes and leave. You owe no service, no conversation and no explanation. The people around you are not there to watch you.
You are not obliged to confess.
Confession and communion are separate things and they happen when you want them, after speaking with a priest. You can attend for years having done neither. Nobody will ask why.
If you decide to talk to a priest, you may vet him first.
Priests are different people with different views, and that is the reality rather than the exception. You have every right to ask a general question before saying anything personal, and to leave if the answer worries you.
If it is bad, you are not obliged to be inside.
Faith does not require you to stand somewhere that hurts. You can pray at home, on the bus, nowhere in particular. No ritual is a precondition for being heard.
About confession
It helps to know what the Church itself has written down about what the person across from you is supposed to be. Canon 102 of the Council in Trullo — a canonical text, not an opinion — instructs those who have received the power to bind and loose to consider the quality of the sin and the readiness of the sinner, and to apply medicine suitable for the disease, lest they fail in healing the sick. The whole canon speaks in the language of medicine: sin, disease, physician, treatment.
So by canon the priest across from you is a physician, not a judge. If he behaves like a judge, he is not keeping his own canon — and you were not wrong to come.
Even so: not everyone will react well. That is the reality and there is no point dressing it up. Which is why the only practical thing we can give you is a way to test the person before you have opened up.
What you can ask before saying anything about yourself
- "Father, may I ask you something general before we talk about me?"
- "How do you see a person who does not fit what is expected of them?"
- "Has anyone ever come to you whom you could not help? What happened?"
- "If someone comes to you with something our culture treats as shameful — what do you say to them first?"
There is no right answer you are listening for. You are listening for whether the person in front of you is listening, or waiting for you to finish. If it is the second — you thank him and leave. That is allowed and it is not a sin.
If anyone offers to "cure" you, that is the moment to leave
This needs a specifically Bulgarian warning, not a general one.
On 17 November 2014 the official website of the Bulgarian Patriarchate published an announcement for the presentation of the book "Prevention of Homosexuality — A Handbook for Parents" by Joseph and Linda Nicolosi, at the "St Archangel Michael" spiritual and educational centre in Varna, with psychologists and clergy taking part. The announcement itself describes Nicolosi as president of the American national association for the research and therapy of homosexuality. The Bulgarian edition was published by Memra in 2011.
So a handbook for preventing homosexuality in children was presented in a church setting and advertised by the institution. This is not a rumour and not a foreign phenomenon — the link is below.
What is known about such practices is gathered on the page about whether this is a choice: among those who went through them, the rate of suicide attempts is markedly higher, and over 80% of these practices, in Bulgaria and worldwide, are carried out by a religious figure rather than a clinician. In Bulgaria conversion practices are not banned by law — only seven European countries have banned them outright, and Bulgaria is not among them. The European Parliament has voted in favour of an EU-wide ban, and in January 2026 the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly called on states to adopt such laws. Until then the only protection is you.
So: if a priest, a psychologist, a relative or a "specialist" offers you a programme, a book, a rule of prayer or a therapy that will fix you — that is not pastoral care. You stand up and you leave. You do not need permission and you owe no explanation.
The synagogue
This community is small. At the 2021 census, 1,736 people in Bulgaria gave their religion as Jewish. That is not few, if you are one of them.
The Sofia Central Synagogue opened on 9 September 1909, designed by the Austrian architect Friedrich Grünanger on the model of the Leopoldstädter Temple in Vienna, which the Nazis later burned. It is the largest in the Balkans, the third largest in Europe, and the largest Sephardic synagogue on the continent.
The Organization of the Jews in Bulgaria "Shalom" has existed since 1990 and has branches in thirteen cities. It is a civic organisation, not a religious authority, and that matters: there is no separate Reform or Conservative community in Bulgaria to turn to if the Orthodox version of Judaism does not fit you.
In world Judaism the differences between movements on exactly this question are enormous. The Reform and Conservative movements in the US and Western Europe marry same-sex couples and ordain openly gay rabbis. Orthodox Judaism as a rule does not — but even there people have stayed inside: Rabbi Steve Greenberg has been Orthodox-ordained and openly gay for decades, and has not left.
If you are a Bulgarian Jew and you are gay, the hardest part is practical: the nearest affirming congregation is in another country and another language. So we list what exists online, rather than a community that does not exist here.
And it is worth saying: Judaism has a built-in tradition of arguing with the text. The Talmud is literally a recorded argument. For someone taught that asking the sacred text a question is rebellion, that alone is a release.
Keshet
US, online
The largest organisation for LGBT inclusion in Jewish life. Materials, training and community resources, readable from anywhere.
Eshel
US, online
Works specifically with Orthodox LGBT Jews and their families — that is, with the people for whom leaving is not an option.
Shalom (OEB)
Sofia and 12 other cities
Not a religious institution, and we found no official statement from it on this question. But it is the only Jewish structure in the country and the place you start from.
"Trembling Before G-d"
film, 2001
A documentary about Orthodox and Hasidic gay Jews. It is old, but it is the first thing many people watched and afterwards understood they were not alone.
We did not confirm whether any of these organisations has a Bulgarian branch or Bulgarian-language material — our searches found none. Nor did we find an official statement from Shalom or from the Central Israelite Religious Council on LGBT people. Not found is not the same as not there.
The mosque
At the 2021 census, 638,708 people in Bulgaria — 10.8% — gave their religion as Muslim. The Chief Mufti's Office keeps a parallel count and puts the figure at close to twice that.
If you are Roma and Muslim and gay, you are standing at the intersection of three things, each of which is charged for separately in Bulgaria. This page cannot take any of that weight off you. It can only refuse to pretend it is not there.
The Roma community in Bulgaria is not religiously uniform, and that is often missed: part of it is Orthodox, part Muslim — mostly in the Rhodopes and the north-east — and since the seventies a large part is evangelical. The mass entry of Roma into Pentecostal and Church of God congregations began in 1977–78 around Chirpan, Stara Zagora, Sliven and Razgrad, and among the Muslim Roma of the Ruse and Silistra regions, and grew after 1989. Today Roma evangelical churches are one of the liveliest religious environments in the country. We found no official position from those churches on homosexuality.
It also matters not to conflate: Bulgarian-speaking Muslims (Pomaks) are not Roma, and Turkish-speaking Roma are not Turks. Who is who matters when you are looking for your own people.
The Chief Mufti's Office is the official institution of the Muslim faith, established in 1909, with a charter from 2012, twenty regional muftiates and around 1,450 congregations. Its public position is clear: in a statement of 24 January 2018 against the Istanbul Convention it called "third gender", "gay society" and "gay marriages" dangerous bottomless traps, and it had earlier sent letters of protest against Pride marches.
And here is one line worth reading twice. On 21 December 2018 the Chief Mufti's own website published a piece on hate speech which states that in 2018 homosexuals were the second most targeted minority group by hate speech. The same institution that called same-sex marriage a trap that same year also published that you are shot at more than almost anyone else. Both sit on the same website. That is not acceptance, but it is acknowledgement — and acknowledgement is the first step institutions take.
Within Islam itself, beyond Bulgaria: there is no single church, no synod, nobody who can issue a universally binding verdict. There are schools, opinions, and imams who have said different things. For someone taught that the question is closed, that matters.
Imaan
UK, online
The oldest organisation for LGBT Muslims in Europe. Online community, resources, and contact with people who have been through the same thing.
Muslims for Progressive Values
international, online
Theological material for an inclusive reading of the Qur'an and hadith, readable from anywhere.
Chief Mufti's Office
Sofia and 20 regional muftiates
The official institution. Its position is the one above — we say so, so you know what to expect if you go the official route.
Roma organisations
Bulgaria
We found no Roma LGBT organisation or initiative with any presence in Bulgaria. We searched in Bulgarian and in English.
We found no fatwa or official document from the Chief Mufti's Office devoted specifically to homosexuality, beyond the Istanbul Convention statement quoted. Nor did we find Bulgarian- or Turkish-language material from affirming Muslim organisations. Again: not found, not "not there".
The woods and the inverted star
These are the people Bulgaria talks about either as folklore or as a danger, and almost never as faith.
They earn a section for two reasons. First: Bulgarian Christianity has never been only Christianity, and anyone who has ever tied a martenitsa knows it. Second: it is in exactly these traditions that the rule this whole page is trying to reach was stated most cleanly.
The thing you already do without calling it faith
Nestinarstvo
The dance on live embers in Strandzha, the climax of the panagyr of Saints Constantine and Helena on 3 and 4 June in the village of Bulgari. UNESCO inscribed it on the Representative List of intangible heritage in 2009, describing what every local knows: the rite blends Orthodox elements with pre-Christian fertility practice. It was once performed in about thirty Bulgarian and Greek villages. Today it survives in one village of about a hundred people — to which thousands come for the feast.
Baba Marta
A red-and-white thread tied on 1 March and taken off when you see the first blossoming tree, swallow or stork. Inscribed by UNESCO in 2017 — jointly by Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Moldova and Romania. Nobody considers it a religion. Nobody skips it either.
Kukeri and survakari
Masked men who drive evil out of the village in midwinter. The first official "Winter Carnival" in Pernik was on 16 January 1966 with 800 participants; the festival became international in 1985 and annual in 2009. A note of sobriety is needed here too: unbroken descent from the Thracians is a romantic claim that ethnography does not confirm as confidently as it gets repeated.
Double faith
Scholars use the term for the folk mixture of paganism and Christianity that the Bulgarian village lived inside for centuries. If you come from a family that keeps both an icon and a red thread and sees no contradiction — you are squarely in that tradition. And you were not the exception; you were the rule.
The eight words
"An it harm none do what ye will."
This is the Wiccan Rede, the ethical rule of modern Wicca. It was first said publicly by Doreen Valiente on 3 October 1964 at a dinner of the Witchcraft Research Association and printed that same year in the newsletter Pentagram; the longer poetic version appeared in 1974.
It did not come from nowhere. Gerald Gardner wrote in 1959 that witches were inclined to the morality of good King Pausole — a character of Pierre Louÿs from 1901 whose rule was: do not harm your neighbour; this being well understood, do that which pleases you. John Stuart Mill echoes in it too.
Notice what the formula does not contain. It contains no list of forbidden people. No exceptions by kin, by blood, by whom you love. There is one condition and it is about harm.
And if that sounds familiar — yes, that is Matthew 22:39 in other words. "Love your neighbour as yourself" and "an it harm none" are the same rule, said from two different sides of the same hill.
And the Satanists, honestly
If the word is what brought you to this section, here is what actually sits behind it — because almost nothing you have heard is true.
There are two different things with similar names. The Church of Satan was founded on Walpurgis Night, 30 April 1966, in San Francisco by Anton Szandor LaVey, who remained its high priest until his death in 1997. The Satanic Temple is much newer, American, and since 26 April 2019 has been recognised as a church by the US tax authority.
The central fact: The Satanic Temple is non-theistic. On its own website, answering whether it believes in Satan, it says: "No, nor do we believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural." For them Satan is a literary figure — the eternal rebel against arbitrary authority, forever defending personal sovereignty, as Milton, Blake and Shelley drew him. There is no altar, no sacrifice, no blood. There are seven tenets, published openly.
We print them in full, because they are surprisingly hard to argue with:
- One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.
- The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
- One's body is inviolable, subject to one's own will alone.
- The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one's own.
- Beliefs should conform to one's best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one's beliefs.
- People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one's best to rectify it and resolve any harm that might have been caused.
- Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.
Quoted verbatim from the source linked below. Note the third and fourth tenets and compare them with whatever you were told about Satanists. Then notice that this whole page rests on the same two ideas: your body is yours, and the line is harm.
No prettifying in this direction either
Paganism is not automatically friendly. Modern Slavic Rodnovery in a number of countries is closely tied to the far right and to antisemitism, and Wicca has a documented conflict of its own: at PantheaCon in 2011 and 2012 trans women were excluded from women's rituals run by Dianic groups, which split the community. In Bulgaria we found no registered pagan, Wiccan or Satanist denomination — the register is kept by the Sofia City Court, there is no minimum number of followers, and the last attempt we found to register a Satanist organisation dates from 2007. So: vet the group before you trust it with anything. Exactly as you vet the priest.
If none of this is you
You may be an atheist. God may never have been necessary to you and this whole page may read like someone else's conversation. That is entirely fine and there is no reproach to you anywhere here.
At the 2021 census, 305,102 people said they had no religion, another 259,235 could not identify one, and 472,606 declined to answer. Together that is over a million people. You are not rare and you are not defective.
And the most honest thing we can tell you: the rule at the end of this page does not require you to believe in anything. It works without God. Which is also why it is not a religious rule.
If something did stay with you — not faith, but a memory of it, the smell of wax, your grandmother's voice — you are allowed to keep it without going back to an institution. Nobody issues permits for that.
The one rule
God loves all of us, as long as we are good people who harm nobody.
If you take one thing from this page, take that sentence — because it is the only thing every faith here repeats in its own words. "Love your neighbour as yourself." "An it harm none." "Compassion and empathy toward all creatures." One and the same line, spoken from four different doorways.
You are not the mistake. The mistake is to hurt a person. That is the line, and it sits in the same place for all of us.
And if you are now counting whether you are good enough — stop. Someone who read to the end of this page because they were worried about being bad has already answered the question.
Go back into the church if you want to. Light a candle. You are not obliged to explain anything to anyone at the door.
LBGT.BG
What we could not find
We write this down because searching for something and not finding it is exhausting, and being promised it exists is worse. Each of the following is a finding of no evidence found, not proof of absence.
There is no affirming religious community in Bulgaria
We searched in Bulgarian in August 2026: LGBT Christians, gay believers, affirming church, queer faith. We found no Bulgarian Christian, Orthodox or Muslim group with any online presence at all. This confirms the same finding on the organisations page. We cannot send you anywhere here.
There is no Bulgarian text written by a gay believer
We looked for a personal account in Bulgarian — someone writing both as gay and as Orthodox. What exists is the opposite: church-adjacent publishing offers "healing", and the one public Bulgarian account by a former cleric, Vasil Vasilev in PROUD.bg in 2021, is an account of leaving faith rather than returning to it. The first thing a Bulgarian search surfaces is a translated page titled "Is it possible to be a gay Christian?", whose answer is "not unless you repent".
We could not find the Synodal Bulgarian text of two books
Genesis and Ezekiel would not open in readable form on any source carrying the Synodal edition — the pages come back with broken encoding or do not exist. So Genesis 19 is summarised, and Ezekiel 16:49–50 is quoted from the Hebrew with the JPS translation. We will not quote you a Bulgarian verse we have not seen.
We found no pastoral document from the BOC on gay believers
We looked for something issued by the Bulgarian Orthodox Church telling a priest how to behave when a gay person comes to him. We found no such document. There are statements against; there is no guidance for.
We did not verify one detail that would have suited us
Encyclopedic sources claim that Shalom has supported LGBT organisations. We found no primary source and therefore do not assert it on this page. Precisely because it suits us, we are not writing it down as fact.
We found no Roma LGBT undertaking at all
No organisation, no initiative, no research with any Bulgarian presence. If it exists, we want to know and we will add it.
Sources
Every church statement here comes from that institution's own website or from the state news agency and carries its date. Biblical verses are copied from the Synodal edition (Holy Synod, Sofia 1992) and rendered literally into English; the two exceptions are flagged in the text. Scholarly literature is cited inline by author, journal and year rather than as links: nearly all of it sits behind paywalls, and a link that will not open is worse than an honest citation. Where it says we did not verify something, we really did not. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will fix it.
- Свещено Писание на Стария и Новия Завет, синодално издание — Левит, 1 Кор., Римл., 1 Тим., Матей, 1 Иоан, Деяния
- Становище на Светия Синод на БПЦ относно Истанбулската конвенция, подписано от патриарх Неофит и членовете на Синода
- Становище на Св. Синод на БПЦ – БП по отношение на повдигнатия въпрос за еднополовото съжителство
- Съобщение на Св. Синод относно приетия Закон за изменение и допълнение на Закона за предучилищното и училищното образование
- Позиция на Светия Синод по повод „София Прайд 2026“ — пълен текст
- „Превенция на хомосексуализма – наръчник за родители“ — обява за представяне на книгата в духовно-просветен център „Св. Архангел Михаил“, Варна
- Джоузеф Николози, Линда Еймс Николози, „Превенция на хомосексуалността – наръчник за родители“, ISBN 9789546700681
- Становище на Главното мюфтийство по Истанбулската конвенция: „трети пол“, „гей общество“, „гей бракове“ … „опасни бездънни капани“
- „Какво, кого и къде мразим най-много“ — хомосексуалните са втората най-засегната от речта на омразата група през 2018 г.
- Етнокултурна характеристика на населението към 7 септември 2021 г. — етническа група и вероизповедание
- Bulgaria — Holocaust Encyclopedia: депортацията на 11 343 евреи от заетите територии, Треблинка, намесата на Църквата
- The Holocaust in Macedonia: Deportation of Monastir Jewry — трите транспорта от Скопие, 22, 25 и 29 март 1943 г.
- Кирил Български — думите му пред задържаните евреи в Пловдив, телеграмата до цар Борис III и признаването му за Праведник на народите
- Димитър Пешев — подписката от 17 март 1943 г. и архивните ѝ сигнатури (ЦДА, ф. 1335К, оп. 1, а.е. 126)
- Menachem Z. Rosensaft, The Ambiguity of Evil and Good: A Tale of Holocaust Rescue and Deportation in Bulgaria
- Contrasting Destinies: the Plight of Bulgarian Jews and the Jews in Bulgarian-occupied Greek and Yugoslav Territories — преброителните данни и разминаващите се числа
- Nestinarstvo, messages from the past: the Panagyr of Saints Constantine and Helena in the village of Bulgari (елемент № 00191)
- Cultural practices associated to the 1st of March (елемент № 01287) — Болгария, Северна Македония, Молдова, Румъния
- There Are Seven Fundamental Tenets — пълният текст на седемте принципа
- The Satanic Temple FAQ — „нито вярваме в съществуването на Сатана или на свръхестественото“
- Wiccan Rede — „An it harm none do what ye will“, Дорийн Валиенте, 1964 г., и по-ранните ѝ съответствия
- The Canons of the Council in Trullo (Quinisext), Canon 102 — свещеникът като лекар, а не като съдия
- Св. Йоан Златоуст, Беседа 62 върху Евангелието на Матей — за скопците в Мат. 19:12
- Евсевий Кесарийски, Църковна история, кн. VI, гл. 8 — „в твърде буквален и краен смисъл“
- Езекиил 16:49–50 — еврейски текст и превод (JPS Tanakh, Gender-Sensitive Edition)
- Второзаконие 25:16 — същата дума „тоева“ за нечестните теглилки
- 1 Corinthians 6:9–10 и 1 Timothy 1:9–10 в Revised Standard Version (© 1946, 1952, 1971)
- 1 Corinthians 6:9–10 в King James Version — „nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind“
- As a 21-year-old seminarian, David Fearon challenged the RSV translators on the word „homosexual“
- Standard Bible Committee Records (RG 70) и личният архив на Luther A. Weigle (MS 1042)
- Prayers of Love and Faith to be made available for use from Sunday — в сила от 17 декември 2023 г.
- Fiducia supplicans — Декларация за пастирския смисъл на благословиите, §31, §38–41
- Anglican Church in Sofia — адрес, служби на английски, контакт
- Metropolitan Community Church — основана 1968 г. от Трой Пери; 172 църкви в 20 държави по преброяване от 2025 г.
- Q Christian Fellowship — виртуални групи и материали
- The Reformation Project — безплатният седемседмичен цикъл по всеки от спорните текстове
- Resources for international LGBTQ youth — кои услуги на The Trevor Project работят извън САЩ
- „От манастира към парада: историята на един гей бивш духовник“ — Васил Василев
- „Възможно ли е да бъдеш гей християнин?“ — това, което българин намира първо, като потърси на български
- Организация на евреите в България „Шалом“
- Bulgaria 2023 International Religious Freedom Report — регистрация на вероизповеданията, държавната субсидия
- Заявление за регистрация на „Орденът на сребърната звезда“ пред Софийски градски съд
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