Brashlyan

Worth a detour

Brashlyan is a Strandzha village of forty-odd people declared an architectural and historical reserve in February 1982. The state tourist register counts seventy-six listed houses in it, nine of national significance. Its church of St Demetrius is sunk into the ground and has a Greek altar of Zeus-Dionysus built into its ambo. Fourteen kilometres north-west of Malko Tarnovo on asphalt.

Story

Background

The old name was Sarmashik, and Brashlyan is a literal translation of it. What survives is a complete Strandzha village: stone ground floors, timber upper storeys, wide eaves, cobbles, and a plan that has not been rationalised. The national register names five individual houses and the church as monuments of national significance, while the tourist register gives the fuller count of seventy-six listed buildings; the municipal list has never been published, so the two figures are both right about different things.

The church of St Demetrius dates from the end of the seventeenth century and stands on a Thracian sanctuary thought to have been dedicated to Dionysus. It is dug down into the ground to gain height without rising above it, and was once enclosed by a wall about two and a half metres high; the facades are faced with dressed travertine. Its bell was cast in Yaroslavl in Russia in the first half of the nineteenth century and is still there. A marble altar to Zeus-Dionysus with a Greek dedicatory inscription is built into the ambo.

The cell school in the annexe was founded in 1871, after the Bulgarian church won its independence, and taught boys of twelve and thirteen until 1877. It has been restored to how it was: no desks, skins on the floor, sticks and wax tablets. There is an ethnographic house museum in a Revival house with a working loom, and an open-air display of traditional farming. The Balyuva house is where Turkish troops killed the first casualties of the 1903 rising; it is a private home now. Village feast on 9 August.