Saint Nedelya Church

Worth a detour

On 16 April 1925 the dome came down on a funeral packed with the country's political and military class. Counts of the dead vary, but around a hundred and fifty is the usual figure, with some five hundred injured. What you walk into was rebuilt on the same ground between 1927 and 1933. Ten minutes inside, and the whole of twentieth-century Bulgaria is in the room with you.

Story

Background

The attack was planned around a body. General Konstantin Georgiev was shot dead on 14 April specifically so that his funeral would gather the elite of the state under one roof; the target was Tsar Boris III, who had survived an ambush of his own two days earlier and was elsewhere in the city at another funeral when the charge in the dome went off. The men who placed it belonged to the military organisation of the Bulgarian Communist Party. The reprisals that followed ran for months.

The rebuilding took from the summer of 1927 to the spring of 1933, when the church was consecrated again on 7 April: about thirty metres long, fifteen and a half wide, thirty-one metres to the top of the central dome. The gilded iconostasis that came through the blast was put back. The wall painting you see is much later — a team led by Nikolay Rostovtsev worked here between 1971 and 1973 — so the interior reads far newer than the building's history.

Stand outside afterwards and look around. The synagogue, the Banya Bashi mosque and the Catholic cathedral of St Joseph are all within four hundred metres of this door, and the excavated Roman streets of Serdica are under the boulevard between them. Sofia does not arrange this for visitors; it simply happens to be how the city is built.