>>4087228Yeah i that was real largely but exaggerated in after War for propaganda reasons and by the Stalin-aligned soviet regime a little later as a clash between ideology…
The Church's had health-related marriage barriers(similarto the Czech Republic) but predated the peak of formal eugenics, and were actively claimed and elaborated by Bulgarian eugenicists(Stefan Konsulov) as supportive of their aims around the turn of the 20th century and into the interwar period. He specifically was a head of the Department of anatomy and bio at Sofia and of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics in the academic years 1932/1933 and 1938/1939. He was a defender of racilism, and his positions provoked some polemic with the professor of philosophy Dimitar Mihalchev in 1939.
He did describ the Bulgarian Orthodox Church as "the only church with racial hygiene laws" and argued that its statutes gave Bulgaria a head start compared with other countries. He and others portrayed older popular practices of scrutinizing a prospective spouse's family health and lineage as proto-eugenic too.
In the early 20th and especially the interwar years, medical writers called for expanding the Exarchate's list of impediments and for pre-nuptial medical certificates. Some Holy Synod statements in the 1920s-1930s linked divorce or marriage restrictions for certain illnesses to preventing "a generation burdened by serious diseases" or the "degeneration of the family."
The Church did not adopt the most radical eugenic demands though (sterilization, broad racial criteria), and later responses sometimes stressed its limited practical power, but its existing rules and occasional supportive language aligned with milder eugenic goals of marital hygiene.
The first part I've read from "ROMA PORTRAITS IN HISTORY: Roma Civic Emancipation Elite in Central, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe from the 19th Century until World War II", though, note that it's written by a trotskyis-turn-liberal…
https://brill.com/view/journals/eceu/38/1/article-p44_3.xmlhttps://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.1515/9789639776883-12/marital-health-eugenics-bulgaria-1878%E2%80%931940-gergana-mircheva