Rock-hewn Churches of Ivanovo

Worth a detour

Fourteenth-century frescoes of the Tarnovo school in a room hollowed out of a cliff above the Rusenski Lom — painted for a monastery that royalty funded and monks reached by ladders. It is one small chapel and a ten-minute climb, so set expectations: you are coming for the quality of the painting, not the size of the site.

Story

Background

A monk called Joachim, later the first patriarch of Tarnovo, began cutting cells into the limestone of the Rusenski Lom gorge in the 1220s. The community that grew there attracted money from the top: Ivan Asen II gave to it, and Ivan Alexander is painted into the wall of the main church as a donor. At its height there were something like forty churches and chapels and several hundred other chambers in the cliffs.

Most of that is gone. Rock falls took some of it — one church collapsed entirely, and the thirteenth-century ceiling paintings of another had to be cut out and moved after the rock gave way. What remains open is a single chamber, known locally as simply 'the Church', thirty-two metres up the gorge wall, and it holds the thing worth the journey: frescoes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, painted by people working at the same moment and to the same standard as the mosaicists of Constantinople.

From the car park it is ten to fifteen minutes up, on a stepped path that follows the route the monks used. It is short but genuinely steep, and the chapel itself is cramped and dim and fills up fast when a coach arrives. Note that the site is not in Ivanovo village at all but about three kilometres east of it — follow the signs, not the name.