The Memorial Temple of the Birth of Christ (Shipka)

Worth a detour

Built between 1885 and 1902 for the Russian soldiers and Bulgarian volunteers killed in the war of 1877–78, in a deliberate seventeenth-century Muscovite style that looks imported because it is. The bells were cast partly from cartridge cases picked up off the battlefields above. The crypt holds the dead. Thirty minutes, and the gold against the wooded slope is the photograph everyone takes.

Story

Background

The church sits in the town of Shipka, on the southern approach to the pass where the fighting happened, and it was conceived as a memorial rather than as a parish church. Construction ran from 1885 to 1902, to a design by Antoniy Tomishko in the style of seventeenth-century Russian church architecture, with Alexander Pomerantsev directing the work. Russian money and Russian architects produced a Russian building on a Bulgarian hillside, which is precisely the relationship the monument is about.

The details are where it lands. The bell tower runs to 53 metres; the bells were cast using metal from cartridge cases collected on the battlefields, the largest weighing around twelve tonnes. Marble plaques inside carry the names of units and of the dead. Beneath the church a crypt holds stone sarcophagi with the remains of men killed in the defence of the pass and in the fighting around Shipka and Sheynovo.

It is worth being clear about what the church is for and why Bulgarians treat it the way they do. The 1877–78 war ended five centuries of Ottoman rule and created a Bulgarian state; roughly a quarter of a million people died in it, on all sides. The gratitude to Russia expressed in these domes is genuine, was politically useful to several later governments, and remains a live argument in Bulgarian politics today. You can hold all three of those facts at once while standing in the churchyard.