Hl Mutter Gottes, Burgas

Worth a detour

Bulgaria has a small Eastern-rite Catholic church — Bulgarians in communion with Rome but worshipping in the Byzantine rite — and this is its Burgas parish, on Sheynovo Street in the Vazrazhdane quarter. It was built as part of the St Joseph girls' school complex, which is why some sources file it under that name. Fifteen minutes, free, and genuinely unusual.

Story

Background

The Uniate churches came out of the nineteenth-century struggle over whether Bulgarians would have their own hierarchy, when some communities sought union with Rome as a way round the Greek patriarchate. The movement left a scatter of parishes across Thrace and the south-east, of which this is one, under the Apostolic Exarchate of Sofia.

The building went up with the girls' school of St Joseph, to designs attributed to Ricardo Toscani working with Svetoslav Slavov — between them responsible for most of the notable architecture in the centre of Burgas. Its date is disputed: the official tourism portal says 1907 and Bulgarian sources say 1918, and this guide does not choose between them. The style is called neo-Gothic by some and neo-Revival by others, which may say as much about the categories as about the building.

Two things to keep straight. The official portal describes this as an Orthodox church, which it is not. And Burgas has a second Catholic church of the Latin rite, Deva Maria Bogoroditsa, built in 1936 and 1937 a few streets away, which is the one most databases are actually pointing at when they say Catholic church, Burgas. The two are five minutes apart on foot and it is worth seeing both, if only because so few people can tell you the difference.