Rozhen Monastery

Worth a detour

Most people drive up, look at the courtyard for twenty minutes and leave. The better version is the walk from Melnik: out through the sandstone pyramids, along the ridge, down into the monastery from above. Inside there is fresco work spanning the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, a carved iconostasis and some of the oldest surviving stained glass in the country. Entry is free. Take water — there is no shade on the ridge.

Story

Background

The monastery sits on a shelf above the Rozhenska river, six or seven kilometres from Melnik, and it is the largest in the Bulgarian part of the Pirin region. Nobody knows when it was founded. A Greek manuscript places something here in the thirteenth century; a church inventory of 1551 is the first mention scholars are comfortable with. What survives above ground is later — a rebuilding that ran through the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, leaving the layers visible.

The painting is the reason to go in. An inscription dates the Pantocrator over the entrance to 1597. The Last Judgement and Jacob's Ladder carry 1611; a cycle on John the Baptist, 1622; the interior of the main church was painted in 1732, with something over a hundred and fifty scenes. The chapel of Saints Cosmas and Damian holds the earliest of the iconostases. The stained glass — small, dark, easy to walk past — is among the oldest preserved in Bulgaria.

Five hundred metres down the road, in the village, the church of Saints Cyril and Methodius was built in 1912–14 at the urging of Yane Sandanski, the revolutionary who ran this corner of Macedonia before the Balkan wars. He is buried beside it. The two buildings together are a fair summary of the region: a monastery that survived by being useful to whoever held the valley, and a grave that marks the moment the valley changed hands.