Bachkovo Monastery

Worth a detour

Quieter than Rila and easier to reach from Plovdiv, with a refectory whose seventeenth-century wall paintings are the reason to come. The ossuary up the hill is older than the rest and usually empty. Both are ticketed separately from the free courtyard, and the ossuary is kept locked — ask inside rather than walking up on spec.

Story

Background

Grigorii Bakuriani, a Byzantine commander of Georgian origin serving Alexios I Komnenos, founded the house in 1083 with his brother's money. He meant it to stay Georgian: the charter he wrote, in Greek and in Georgian, brought the first monks from Tao and Klarjeti and expressly barred monks of Greek origin. When it stopped being a Georgian monastery is not something anyone here will tell you.

Almost nothing of the eleventh century is left above ground except the ossuary, which stands on its own about three hundred metres east of the walls and is the oldest surviving building. It has two floors — graves below, a funeral church above — and frescoes in two campaigns, the earliest by a painter from Iveron at the end of the eleventh century, with fourteenth-century additions that include Tsar Ivan Alexander. It is a museum now, but it is kept locked and opened on request.

The rest is seventeenth century and later. The main church of the Dormition went up in 1604 over Bakuriani's foundations and holds the monastery's icon of the Virgin, whose silver facing was made in 1311. The old refectory, restored in 1623, carries the paintings people come for: a Tree of Jesse with a dozen ancient philosophers ranked along the wall, Socrates and Plato and Diogenes among them, and the seven Ecumenical Councils. Zahari Zograf painted the small church of St Nicholas in the southern courtyard in 1840, and put several well-known citizens of Plovdiv into his Last Judgement.