Митрополит Евстатије и успостављање српске црквене управе у Нишавској митрополији 1878.
Metropolitan Eustatius and the Establishment of Serbian Church Administration in the Metropolis of Nishava in 1878

Summary/Abstract: Metropolitan Eustatius Dimitrakhiev, also known as Eustatius of Pelagonia, Zograf or Nisava, came from a merchant family in the Pazardzhik area. He was ordained in the Rila Monastery, and then spent some time in the Zograf monastery on the Holy Mountain. Within the structure of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, he advanced to the rank of an archimandrite. Supported by prominent Bulgarians, he gained solid theological education, studying at the Holy Theological School of Halki, then in Iashi, Kiev and Moscow. He also attended lectures in philosophy at the University of Berlin, and in medicine at the Sorbonne University in Paris. After his return, he founded a school and a hospital in the Zograf Monastery. In the period from 1872 to 1874 he was the first Pelagonian (Bitola) metropolitan of the Bulgarian exarchy. From 1874 to 1878, after the replacement of Partenius of Zograf, he was the metropolitan of Nishava, with a residence in the city of Pirot. In December 1877, he greeted the liberation of Pirot by the Serbian army, and soon after he established a relationship with the Serbian state and military authorities, as well as with Metropolitan Mihailo Jovanović. With them, however, he had huge misunderstandings regarding the ethnicity of the believers in his metropolis and loyalty to the Bulgarian exarchate. At the time when the negotiations on the establishment of new borders in the Balkans were in progress, he was actively working to ensure that the population of the Metropolis of Nishava declared to join the future Bulgarian state. The Serbian authorities sent him to Kruševac for some time, where he was greeted with all honours and had a good treatment all the time, but that was not his desire. At the insistence of the Russian military authorities in Bulgaria, he was returned to the Metropolis of Nishava. After the Berlin Congress, when the largest part of his metropolis went to the Principality of Serbia, he left Pirot to Sofia. He was a member of the Bulgarian Constitutional Assembly in 1879. From 1883, he was a metropolitan at the headquarters of the Bulgarian exarchy in Constantinople. From 1885 he administrated the Metropolis of Edirne. That same year he died. He was buried next to the Bulgarian church at Edirne.

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