Alexander Nevsky Cathedral

Worth a detour

Built between 1882 and 1912 as a monument to the Russian soldiers who died in the war that ended Ottoman rule, and sized accordingly. Skip the queue for the nave if you are short of time and go down to the crypt instead: it holds the best collection of Bulgarian icons in the country.

Story

Background

The foundation stone went down in March 1882, four years after the war that made Bulgaria a state again, and the building was not finished for thirty years. The design is by Alexander Pomerantsev, a Russian architect working in the Byzantine Revival manner: brick, half-domes stepping up to a gilded central dome, and a bell tower reaching fifty-three metres. Inside it runs roughly seventy-four metres by fifty-two, which was enough to seat a good part of the capital.

It was dedicated to Alexander Nevsky, the medieval Russian prince and the name-saint of the tsar whose army had fought here — a piece of thank-you architecture, and a deliberate one. The building was finally consecrated in 1924. Its scale still has no competition on the Sofia skyline, and the interior is darker and plainer than the outside leads you to expect: marble, onyx, a lot of shadow and very little natural light.

The better half of a visit is underground. The crypt was converted into a museum of Orthodox icons and now holds the national collection — panels brought in from churches and monasteries across the country, some of them from the tenth century onward, arranged chronologically in vaulted rooms. It is quiet, well lit, and almost nobody in the square above goes down to it.