A Reformation, Which Never Happened: the Case of Bulgaria (Concepts — Influences — Ideas)

The article deals with the impact and reception of reformational ideas in Bulgarian culture in the perspective of modernization problems. The subject of the analysis is both the local understanding of the concepts “Reformation” and “Protestant propaganda” as well as the activity of (neo)protestant missions in the Bulgarian lands in the 19th and 20th centuries. The aim is to identify the links between Bulgarian modernity and Protestant thought and to problematize relations between cultural facts and the official discourse on the subject. The “Bulgarian case” illustrates the modern Orthodox-Protestant meeting and, in this sense, the problem of adaptation of “foreign” patterns in the process of the modernization of culture