Cathedral of St Joseph, Sofia

Worth a detour

The original cathedral was destroyed in the Allied raids on Sofia in March 1944, and the plot stayed empty for nearly sixty years. John Paul II blessed the foundation stone of the replacement on his visit in 2002; the new building was inaugurated in May 2006. It is plain, bright and entirely modern, which makes it the odd one out in this quarter.

Story

Background

Catholics are a small minority in Bulgaria, and this is their principal church — the seat of the diocese of Sofia and Plovdiv, served by Capuchin friars. The original cathedral was one of many buildings lost when Sofia was bombed in March 1944, and for the whole communist period the site stayed vacant, which was not an accident of funding.

Construction of the present building began in 2002, after the foundation stone was blessed during John Paul II's visit to Bulgaria that May. It was inaugurated on 21 May 2006, with Cardinal Angelo Sodano representing Rome, and it is the largest Catholic cathedral in the country. There is nothing historic about it and nothing pretending to be; the interest is in the contrast, and in the fact of its being here at all.

It also completes the short walk that most visitors do without noticing they are doing it. Within about four hundred metres of this door stand the Orthodox cathedral of St Nedelya, the Banya Bashi mosque and the Sofia synagogue, with the excavated Roman streets of Serdica underneath the boulevard in between. Four faiths and two thousand years inside the space of a few blocks is unusual anywhere, and Sofia does not make much of it.