Dryanovo Monastery

Worth a detour

Two very different things sit within a few hundred metres of each other in this gorge: a monastery where a band of insurgents was besieged for nine days in 1876 and almost all of them killed, and a cave that has produced the oldest directly dated Homo sapiens remains in Europe. The setting — limestone walls, a river, a footbridge — does a lot of the work. Easy from Veliko Tarnovo or Gabrovo.

Story

Background

The monastery goes back to the twelfth century and was burned and rebuilt more than once under Ottoman rule before being re-established on this spot in 1845. Its place in Bulgarian memory comes from the spring of 1876. During the April Uprising a detachment under Pop Hariton and Bacho Kiro, a schoolteacher from Byala Cherkva, took position in the monastery and held it against a much larger Ottoman force for nine days. The buildings were shelled and burned, the great majority of the men died, and Bacho Kiro was captured and hanged shortly afterwards. There is an ossuary on the site for them.

That rising failed badly, and the reprisals that followed it are what turned European opinion and led, within two years, to the war that produced a Bulgarian state. Every Bulgarian schoolchild knows this gorge for that reason.

About three hundred metres away, in the cliff above the river, is Bacho Kiro cave — Bulgaria's first electrically lit show cave, wired in 1938, and named after the same man two years later. In 2020 a team publishing in Nature reported human remains from the cave directly dated to around 45,000 years ago, the earliest securely dated modern humans yet found in Europe, alongside stone tools and pendants made from cave bear teeth. Standing between the two you are looking at the very short and the very long version of the same question about who was here.