Central Synagogue of Sofia

Worth a detour

Consecrated in 1909 for a community descended from Jews expelled from Spain and settled across the Ottoman Balkans, and built for well over a thousand worshippers. The Viennese brass chandelier is the largest in the country. Upstairs is a small museum that includes the reason Bulgaria's own Jews were not deported. Go on a weekday — it shuts for two sets of holidays.

Story

Background

Friedrich Grünanger designed it, worked on it from 1905, and delivered a Spanish-Moorish building with Viennese Secession detailing. It was dedicated on 9 September 1909 in front of King Ferdinand and the prime minister. The main hall is octagonal, the dome nineteen metres across and twenty-three to the inside of its crown, thirty-one metres to the top outside; there are 1,170 seats in the prayer hall. The mosaic is Venetian, the columns Carrara marble, the joinery Slavonian oak, and the chandelier came from Vienna. A bomb struck the north-east corner on 13 April 1944 and failed to explode, but the shock took out the stained glass.

The museum on the upper floor holds two permanent displays, on the Jewish communities of Bulgaria and on the Holocaust. The second carries a story with two halves that have to be told together. The roughly fifty thousand Jews living inside Bulgaria's pre-war borders were never put on the trains: deputy speaker Dimitar Peshev's revolt in parliament on 19 March 1943, backed by senior Orthodox clergy and by public protest, forced the deportations to be cancelled. At the same time, more than eleven thousand Jews from the territories Bulgaria occupied in Aegean Thrace and Vardar Macedonia were handed to the Germans and murdered at Treblinka.

The congregation today is a fraction of the one this room was sized for. That is also part of what you are looking at.