The Rev. Bodjidar Popov opened an envelope and pulled out a black and white, ruffled-edge photo of his father, Simeon Popov, preaching from a pulpit in Shumen, a pulpit the father and son would later share.
The Rev. Simeon Popov survived both world wars, Soviet takeover of his country and nearly six years in prison work camps. He lived long enough to convene Bulgaria’s first meeting of “survived Methodists” in 1990 after the fall of communism. Only three Bulgarian congregations remained in their own church buildings through the Cold War.
Now 85, Bodjidar Popov is just younger than his father was when he died. He lives in the small apartment he once shared with his wife, Spaska, surrounded by the chocolates his daughters send him from Switzerland and the new editions of his father’s books.
Popov leaned back in his chair and spoke through his translator, the Rev. Jessica Morris-Ivanova, who now co-pastors the Shumen United Methodist Church with her husband.
“I want to start with the year 1937,” Popov said. He also shared a booklet about his father’s story that was written by the Rev. Bedros Altonian, who grew up in Shumen.
That was the year his family moved to Voyvodovo for his father to serve a church just south of the Danube and the Romanian border. Three-quarters of the town were Czech Protestants who had fled persecution. Bulgarians had invited the sturdy, hard-working farmers to repopulate the borderlands and the town boomed to 800. Bodjidar — whose name means “God’s gift” — was 5 years old and the youngest of three children.
His father led the largest of the three churches in the community.
In the years that followed, Bulgaria was pressured to join the Nazis in World War II. Soon after, the Allied bombing of the capital began. The mission board of the U.S. Methodist Church had been funding many pastors’ salaries. The Popovs’ church was a mission community and with the war underway, their access to funds was cut off in 1942.
Simeon Popov called the family together and they decided to cash in a small life insurance policy, then use the money to buy two cows and a plow and become farmers, like their Czech church members. The church taught them how to survive.
“We lived in a primitive way,” Bodjidar Popov said. “We had a wood stove but there wasn’t wood in the village. We burned sod from the fields, we would burn the shafts of wheat.”
By 1947, the Soviets had come and Bulgaria became communist. The villagers made almost everything they needed themselves and turned over a portion to the state.
One year with a particularly poor harvest, the Popovs’ hillside land produced even less then their neighbors. Simeon Popov was told he would be required to turn over his entire crop.
“I said, ‘What are we going to eat?’ My mother said, ‘I am not going to give it away.’” But his father insisted because pastors were already being arrested. “My father said, ‘If we don’t give them the wheat, they will take me and throw me into prison anyway.’”
Word spread amongst the village’s 200 homes that the pastor’s family was without bread. The Popovs would wake in the morning to find bags of wheat left in their yard at night.
“We had wheat, not just enough for food but also enough to sow for the crop,” Bodjidar Popov said. “Like the widow in Elijah … she said this is the last wheat and oil. Elijah said to make the bread, and so she did. We’ve experienced these biblical stories that have been true reality in our lives.”
In 1949, the Bulgarian communists cracked down on religious groups. Church members’ farm equipment was confiscated. A man who ran a small meat-packing plant and had donated oil for the church’s petroleum light was beaten in jail and his property taken. But the community banded tightly together.
“The faith in God connected us. Whoever was in need, we helped,” Bodjidar Popov said, relating how neighbors would collect donations for those in need.
Communist leaders decided to break up Christian communities by going after church leaders. Simeon Popov was working in the fields when the local militia came. They tore apart his house and took him to jail.
That summer, Simeon Popov was put on trial for being a spy and telling government secrets. His wife, Elsa, was horrified to see her husband visibly shaking, then pleading guilty to all charges. Nearly all the pastors pled guilty, including the Rev. Yanko Ivanov, the Methodist district superintendent for Bulgaria, who received a life sentence.
The pastors’ families could not understand why the men would plead guilty, Bodijar Popov said. But the superintendent’s son explained that while his father had held off despite repeated beatings, he relented when the militia brought in his wife, beat her and threw her into the next cell, where he could hear her weeping.
Throughout the country, nearly every pastor who had trained abroad was imprisoned. Simeon Popov, who had studied at a Bible college in Switzerland where he met his Swiss wife, was sentenced to six years and six months hard labor. Every two days he worked counted as three days toward his sentence, allowing him earlier release.
But Bodjidar Popov said his father kept faith in God.
“My father was waving his hand at me, ‘God will not forsake us. Do not worry.’ I was so disappointed and discouraged,” he said.
After Simeon Popov’s release, he eventually moved to his hometown of Shumen and began preaching around the country. He was chased out of the capital by city officials who threatened him never to return, so he began writing collections of his sermons and other Christian books. They were published outside the country with no author listed.
In the late 1970s, Communist Party officials strategized to more subtly remove the influence of Protestant churches while maintaining tight control of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church leadership. The Rev. Margarita Todorova, a United Methodist pastor and church historian, unearthed documentation after the fall of communism that laid out plans to force church mergers, confiscate funds for trumped-up financial irregularities and eliminate church properties from public view.
A large international hotel was proposed next to the Shumen Methodist Church, she found. According to a 1982 report from the Ministry on Foreign Affairs, party officials feared the church, which had been built just after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, “could become a place visited by foreigners staying at the hotel which in itself could stir up and stimulate the church activity.”
Simeon Popov was offered remote space on the far side of town for his church, but countered that the existing building was owned by foreign mission boards who would protest and embarrass the country if the land was confiscated. After many appeals to the municipal and national authorities, the property was declared a historic site that could not be removed.
Bodjidar Popov had been working as an electrical technician in a theater company and his wife, Spaska, was a German teacher in central Bulgaria when Simeon Popov had a heart attack. Bodjidar had sometimes preached for his father and was asked to take his father’s pulpit while he recovered. It was August 1989, just three months before the Berlin Wall fell.
That spring, a frail Simeon Popov convened the Bulgarian Provisional Conference meeting. The pictures of him leading the prayer and blessing the communion bread are among that last ever taken of him, his son said. He died not long after his birthday in October.
Bodjidar Popov was commissioned to pastor the Shumen church where he served for nearly two decades. He said his last life mission is to get new editions of his father’s works — now bearing Simeon Popov’s name — into the hands of Bulgarians. He delivers them to public libraries and churches.
Whitehouse is a professor of Broadcasting and Electronic Media at Eastern Kentucky University and a Fulbright Scholar studying at Sofia University in Bulgaria.
News media contact: Vicki Brown, Nashville, Tennessee, (615) 742-5470 or [email protected]. To read more United Methodist news,
Like what you're reading? Support the ministry of UM News! Your support ensures the latest denominational news, dynamic stories and informative articles will continue to connect our global community. Make a tax-deductible donation at ResourceUMC.org/GiveUMCom.