Holy Forty Martyrs Church

Worth a detour

This is the closest thing Bulgaria has to a national reliquary, and it is a small, low, easily missed building at the foot of Tsarevets. Inside are three inscribed stone columns — two ninth-century ones in Greek, brought here deliberately, and Ivan Asen II's own in Bulgarian — and the graves of the medieval dynasty that put them there. Twenty minutes, if you read the columns; ten if you do not.

Story

Background

Ivan Asen II built the church after the Battle of Klokotnitsa in March 1230, where he broke the ruler of Epirus and made Tarnovo the dominant power in the Balkans. He recorded the victory himself, carved onto a column that still stands inside. Next to it he set two older stones he had brought in deliberately: a column of Khan Omurtag from the ninth century, its inscription describing a palace on the Danube and then turning, abruptly, to the shortness of a life however grand; and a boundary marker from the reign of Krum. Placing three centuries of Bulgarian rulers in one room was the point.

The graves are the other reason to come. A burial found here in the twentieth century is generally identified as Kaloyan, killed outside Thessaloniki in 1207, and the church is also taken to hold Ivan Asen II and his wife Anna-Maria. For a country whose medieval state was erased for five hundred years, having the bodies and the handwriting in the same building matters more than the architecture does.

Then a second layer: on 22 September 1908 the proclamation ending Bulgaria's formal subordination to the Sultan was read out here, which is why the date and this church are bound together in every school textbook. The building itself has been knocked about, converted, damaged and restored repeatedly, so do not expect thirteenth-century fabric everywhere you look. The columns are the real thing.