For years, the local Bulgarian community hasn’t had a house of worship to call its own.
“It’s kind of killing all the efforts throughout all the generations that Bulgarians had put into preserving the faith and passing it on,” said Maria Rahneva. “It’s not only faith … the church plays a huge role in the upbringing of the next generation, [in] preserving the literature and passing on values, and there’s no place right now.”
Rahneva said that her family often commutes to the Bulgarian Cultural Center in Billerica right now.
“The school presides there, some small events are performed there, and the father is trying to have sermons, but it’s very hard,” she said. “It’s not a church at all.”
They also sometimes visit other Orthodox houses of worship.
“The majority of the Bulgarian population is Bulgarian Orthodox,” she explained. “Though we’re very close to the Greek Orthodox or the Russian Orthodox, we’re a little bit different. Right now, we are visiting their places of worship.”
But with a little support from the wider community, that soon may change.
“There is no place to worship, to serve, to confess, to cry, to unload, to celebrate, to be baptized, to get married … to get together,” reads the description on Go Fund Me, recently launched by Rahneva and her husband, Miro, who owns KOCA Hair Design & Barbershop on Leonard Street.
Massachusetts has the country’s fourth-largest Bulgarian population by percentage of the total population, according to World Population Review, which collected data from the 2022 U.S. Census.
The couple is raising money to buy a space that can be transformed into a house of worship for the Bulgarian Orthodox community.
One location they have their eye on is the Belmont-Watertown United Methodist Church in Cushing Square, which was listed for sale in 2023. The church and parish house were taken off the market after eight months of failing to get any viable offers. According to Joel Grimm, the chair of the congregation’s board of trustees, the board’s current focus is on selling the congregation’s church building in Watertown. However, he is aware of the Rahnev family’s interest in the Belmont landmark.
If it doesn’t work out with the church on Common Street, Rahneva said, the money will be put toward acquiring another space with a more church-like feel than the building in Billerica.
For years, the couple’s priest rented space at a Serbian church, paying for it out of his own pocket, according to Rahneva. Now, because there is a little space at the cultural center, he’s trying to save money and hold services there.
“But it’s not working,” she said.
Rahneva and Miro, who live in Winchester with their two children, both arrived in the United States from Bulgaria about 20 years ago.
“It is still hard for us,” said Rahneva. “Our children do not have the vibe of going to church. Though they’re raised in the Bulgarian Orthodox environment and they’re christened, they don’t have that feeling that the church gives them support or they can find help there. They don’t have that feeling because we don’t have a building.”
She said she worries her children will “lose part of their background.”
“Not being able to celebrate their traditions around the holidays, because everything is involved around the church,” Rahneva said. “[Finding a church] is a really dear task to us.”
More information can be found online.