The Splitting of the Orthodox Millet As a Secularizing Process the Clerical-Lay Assembly of the Bulgarian Exarchate (Istanbul 1871)
243 D EMETRIOS S TAMATOPOULOS / T HESSALONIKI The Splitting of the Orthodox Millet as a Secularizing Process The Clerical-Lay Assembly of the Bulgarian Exarchate (Istanbul 1871) In the fall of 1858 the first session of the Millet-i Provisional Council was convened at Fener, in the headquarters of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Istanbul; this has become known as the “Ethnosynelefsi” (“National Assembly”)1, i.e. an assembly of clerical and lay representatives of the Orthodox millet (= religious community in the Ottoman Empire) resulting from the articles of a famous imperial decree, that of the Hatt-i Hümayûn of 1856.2 The Assembly’s proceedings went on for two years, and led to the creation of a “constitutional” text, the General Regulations, which for the We should be cautious about calling the assembly of the millet’s representatives in 1858–1860 a “National Assembly” or “National” Provisional Council. The Ottoman text refers to a “commission” (komisyon), which undertook the task of formulating the Gen- eral Regulations. The term “national” became established in Greek texts of the late 19th century, when the developments described in this article as the “splitting of the millet” were re-interpreted as the “rise of the nation”, i.e., the Greek nation, within the framework of the Ottoman Empire. However, this is an anachronism and a projection of national stereotypes onto a more complex reality. For this reason, for the Assembly of 1858–1860, we will employ the term Millet-i Assembly, viz., Assembly of the Orthodox millet (al- though the great majority of representatives were Greek Orthodox, particularly after the withdrawal of two of the four Bulgarian representatives), or Patriarchate’s Assembly, in order to distinguish it from the Assembly of the Bulgarian Exarchate.
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