Holy Cross church

Worth a detour

Burgas has had an Armenian community since the sixteenth century and this is its church: a stone building of 1853 on Mihail Lermontov Street, raised on the site of the earlier wooden chapel of Surp Stepanos. Single-nave in the Armenian manner with a substantial narthex and a bell tower, faced in stone slabs, and listed as a cultural monument since 1970.

Story

Background

The record of Armenians settling in Burgas goes back to 1549. Travellers describe a wooden chapel dedicated to Surp Stepanos here in 1673; a wooden church went up in 1748, and the present stone one, Surp Hach — the Holy Cross — replaced it in 1853. The community's first school opened in 1860 or 1861.

The building is in the Armenian tradition rather than the Bulgarian: a single nave and a single undivided space, with a narthex of real size in front of it and a bell tower, and the facade faced in dressed stone slabs. It has been altered a good deal over the years. Listing as a monument of culture came in 1970.

In the churchyard, on the north side, stands the memorial to the victims of the Armenian genocide, put up in 1990 to a design by the sculptor Hari Norhaik Arabyan. Its inscription refers to the deportation and killing of more than a million Armenians between 1915 and 1918. The Burgas Armenian community is one of the older ones on the Bulgarian coast and the church is still in use, so the two things — a working church and a memorial to a catastrophe — occupy the same small courtyard. No opening hours are published, which is normal here; try in the morning.