Monastery of Saint John of Rila

Worth a detour

If you see only one monastery in Bulgaria, this is where it makes the most sense: the black-and-white arcades, the painted porch and the mountains standing over all of it explain, in about ten seconds, why these places mattered so much. Arrive before the coaches from Sofia — first light in the courtyard is the whole point.

Story

Background

A hermit called Ivan of Rila settled in a cave in these mountains in the tenth century; the monastery grew up around his followers rather than around him. What you walk into today is almost entirely nineteenth century — a fire in 1833 destroyed nearly everything, and the rebuilding became a national project of the Bulgarian Revival, paid for by donations from across the country.

One piece survived: Hrelyo's Tower of 1335, the squat stone keep in the middle of the courtyard, built when a local feudal lord needed somewhere to survive a siege. The rest — the striped arcades, the five hundred frescoes on the porch, the carved iconostasis — belongs to the 1830s and 1840s, with much of the painting attributed to Zahari Zograf and his circle.

The monastery's role was never only religious. Through the Ottoman centuries it functioned as a store of manuscripts, script and language at a time when there was no Bulgarian state to keep them.