History of Bulgaria During Ottoman Administration - Bulgarian Awakening

Bulgarian Awakening

Millet system was a set of confessional communities in the Ottoman Empire. It referred to the separate legal courts pertaining to "personal law" under which religious communities were allowed to rule themselves under their own system. The Sultan regarded the Ecumenical Patriarch of the Constanstinople Patriarchate as the leader of the Orthodox Christian peoples of his empire. After the Ottoman Tanzimat (1839–76) reforms, Nationalism arose in the Empire and the term was used for legally protected religious minority groups, similar to the way other countries use the word nation. New millets were created in 1860 and 1870 for Uniate and Orthodox Bulgarian Christian communities. In this way a separate Bulgarian diocese was established, based on ethnic identity rather than principles of Orthodoxy and territory.

Armed resistance to the Ottoman rule escalated in the third quarter of the 19th century and reached its climax with the April Uprising of 1876 that covered part of the ethnically Bulgarian territories of the empire and was suppressed by Ottoman troops, taking the lives of many. The uprising was a reason for the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 that ended with the establishment of an independent Bulgarian state in 1878, albeit far smaller than what Bulgarians had hoped and what was projected by the preliminary Treaty of San Stefano of 1878.