Holy Trinity Church in Malko Tarnovo

Worth a detour

Strandzha had a substantial Eastern Catholic community, and this is its church: built between 1931 and 1936 on the site of an earlier one of 1868, solemnly consecrated in April 1936, and still an active parish. It holds icons brought from the Adrianople church of Sts Cyril and Methodius. Fifteen minutes, free, and a reminder that the religious history of this border is not simple.

Story

Background

Bulgarian Eastern Catholics — Uniates — are a small community that came out of the nineteenth-century struggle over the Bulgarian church, and Strandzha and Thrace were among their strongholds. The parish here goes back to the 1860s and the present building replaced an 1868 church, going up between 1931 and 1936 and being consecrated on the fourth of April that year.

Its icons come from the Bulgarian Catholic church of Sts Cyril and Methodius in Adrianople, brought west when that community was uprooted, which makes the building a piece of refugee history as well as a church. In May 2002 Pope John Paul II, on his visit to Bulgaria, crowned the icon of the Częstochowa Mother of God kept here.

A correction worth carrying. Malko Tarnovo's Orthodox parish church is not this one: it is the Dormition of the Mother of God, built in 1745, rebuilt into its present form in 1830 with the help of Russian soldiers of General Diebitsch's army, and consecrated again in May 1899 after a third rebuilding. It holds over a hundred and fifty icons and is listed as a cultural monument. Several guides conflate the two and give the Holy Trinity the Dormition's dates. Neither church publishes opening hours; ask at the museum or the tourist information centre in the town garden.