St Paul of the Cross Cathedral

Worth a detour

The odd one out in Bulgarian church architecture: three naves, pointed brick, a tower thirty-one metres high, designed by Valentino Dell'Antonio from Moena in the Dolomites and finished in 1892 for a congregation of about 1,300 people, almost all of them Austrians working on the river and the railway. The stained glass, made in Budapest and finished in 1899, is the reason to go inside rather than photograph it from the street.

Story

Background

Ruse became the main centre of Catholicism in northern Bulgaria in the 1880s, when the Nicopolis diocese was redrawn to the borders of the new principality. A small church went up in 1860 and a parish formed around it in 1870, but the community outgrew both. The foundation stone of the present cathedral was laid on 12 October 1890 and the money ran out with the walls a metre above ground; a French Passionist, Henri Doulcet, raised the rest abroad, and the church was consecrated exactly two years later to the day.

It is small for a cathedral — twenty-six metres long, thirteen wide, thirteen high — and unusually complete. The furnishings were carved in Bohemia. The windows are by Sándor Ligeti of Budapest and run the Passion and the Resurrection round the building. There is an organ installed in 1908, said to be the oldest surviving instrument of its kind in the country.

One window is modern, and it is the one to look for. It was finished on 11 November 2012 for the four Bulgarian Catholic clergy shot in Sofia on 11 November 1952. One of them, Eugene Bossilkov, had been consecrated bishop in this church five years before his arrest. By the 2021 census the Catholic community in Ruse was down to around six hundred people.