protesting, but no one takes any notice of that. Once more in the history of the Orthodox Church the Yildiz-Kiösk has spoken, the cause is finished. So the Macedonian Vlachs now have a Roumanian Liturgy and Roumanian schools; they, too, are a millet, and without question the next step will be to give them a Roumanian bishop or two, who will become autocephalous as soon as the two Servian bishops in Macedonia do, and there will be two more independent sister-Churches for the Phanar to recognize.[1]
16. The Church of Hercegovina and Bosnia (1880).
The last Church of this list is that of the two provinces occupied by Austria since the Berlin Congress. It is known that the Sultan remains the nominal sovereign of these lands, and that Austria administers them, much as in the parallel case of England and Egypt. The position of the Orthodox Church corresponds to this state of things. According to the general principle that the Œcumenical Patriarch reigns in the Balkans just as far as the Porte, Hercegovina and Bosnia have not been formally declared autocephalous; but just as the rule of the Sultan is merely titular here, so are their Churches really completely independent of the Phanar. On March 28, 1880, a Concordat was drawn up between the Austrian Government and the Patriarch which regulates the position of this Church. The Patriarch is still named in the Holy Liturgy, and the chrism is sent to them from Constantinople. On the other hand the Emperor appoints the bishops without consulting the Phanar (the Austro-Hungarian Ambassador to the Porte then informs the Phanar of the appointment[2]), they consecrate each
- ↑ A Roumanian paper counts 394,700 Vlachs in Macedonia, 20,000 in Albania, 160,000 scattered throughout Turkey, 220,000 in Greece, and 100,000 in Bulgaria (E. d'Or. vii. p. 179). The Roumanian Government has just published a Green Book in French (Le Livre vert roumain, Bucarest, 1905) containing a most appalling indictment of the Patriarch's persecution of the Macedonian Vlachs, accusing the Greeks among other things of wholesale murder.
- ↑ As a matter of fact the Phanar goes through this farce each time: as soon as they hear of the Emperor's appointment they set up the new bishop with two others as candidates for the see, hold an election, and elect the one the Emperor has chosen.
