Basarbovo Monastery

Worth a detour

Rooms cut into the cliff about thirty-five metres above the Rusenski Lom, reached by a stone stair, with a church, cells and a spring inside the rock. It is the only rock monastery in the country still in use, and that changes the experience entirely: this is a household, not an excavation. Ten minutes off the road south from Ruse, and open every day.

Story

Background

The monastery goes back to the Second Bulgarian Empire and belonged to a much larger complex of hesychast cells strung along the Lom canyon. Its first appearance in writing is in a fifteenth-century Ottoman tax register, which is the usual way these places surface: as a line in an accounts book.

Its saint is Dimitar Basarbovski, a shepherd from the village below who lived as an ascetic in these rocks and died in 1685. His relics were taken north during the Russo-Turkish war of the 1770s and have been in the church of Saints Constantine and Helena in Bucharest ever since — so the monastery is named for a saint who is somewhere else, and Romanians arrive here knowing the name from home. His feast is 26 October.

The place was revived in 1937 and listed as a monument in 1978, and for most of its modern life it has been kept going by one monk at a time. A new church of the Transfiguration was begun in 2005. The stair up the cliff face is the part people remember; the rooms behind it are small, low and still in use.