Saint Demetrius Cathedral, Vidin

Worth a detour

Vidin is a small and steadily emptying town on the Danube with a cathedral built for somewhere three times the size. The foundation stone went down in 1885, the first liturgy was held in 1890, and the building was not finished until the 1920s — four decades of arguing with money, which you can read in the fabric. The dome stands thirty-three metres up.

Story

Background

There had been a wooden church of St Dimitar here that rotted past saving. The replacement was begun on 10 March 1885 to a plan by Gencho Kanev of Tryavna and then reworked by an architect recorded as Bahnani, who turned a single-tower design into the two-towered, cross-domed building that stands now: three naves running lengthways, one across, and a central dome at thirty-three metres. It is generally described as the second-largest church in the country after Alexander Nevsky in Sofia.

The woodwork is the best thing inside. The iconostasis and the church furniture were carved by masters of the Debar school, from the Filipov family — the same tradition that produced most of the good carving in the western Balkans in that century.

Scale is the point of the whole enterprise. Vidin had been the seat of Ivan Sratsimir's fourteenth-century tsardom and later the base of Osman Pazvantoğlu, a governor who ran the region as his own state; after 1878 it was a border town that had lost its importance and knew it. A cathedral this size, taking forty years and several generations of donations, is the town saying otherwise.