That great Saint of our Bulgarian Orthodox Church, the venerable Metropolitan Clement (Drumev) of Tirnovo—Confessor, champion, and Martyr for Orthodoxy—, during the time of Stambolov’s dictatorship, said, in a famous sermon delivered on the Sunday of Orthodoxy in 1893: “The true Faith of Christ is not, and cannot be, anything else but our pure, Holy Orthodox Faith.... Our Orthodox Faith is the true word of God, the pure truth of God, the great power of God—power that is both invincible and beneficial to all true believers.” [²⁴]

THE VERY REVEREND SERGIUS, former Assistant Professor at the Theological Academy in Sofia, Bulgaria, is the spiritual Father of the Russian Convent of the Holy Protection in Sofia, which is under the jurisdiction of Bishop Photii of Triaditza, the sole Hierarch of the True (Old Calendar) Orthodox Church of Bulgaria and himself a former Assistant Professor at the University of Sofia. Father Sergius was dismissed from his academic post when he refused to accept the New “Revised,” or Papal, Calendar, on the occasion of its introduction into the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. He is rightly considered a confessor of the Faith by traditionalist Bulgarian believers. This essay was written in celebration of the Sunday of Orthodoxy, 1998.