Troyan Monastery

Worth a detour

The third largest monastery in Bulgaria, and the one where you get closest to Zahari Zograf's work without the crowds at Rila. He painted the church inside and out in 1847–48 and put the monks themselves into the composition. It is free, it is a working monastery with guest rooms, and mid-morning on a weekday you may well have the courtyard to yourself.

Story

Background

The chronicles put the founding at the start of the seventeenth century, by hermits who settled in the Cherni Osam valley. It became stauropegial in 1830 — answerable directly to the Patriarch rather than to a local bishop — and the church you walk into now was built in 1835 by a master mason from Peshtera. The gilded iconostasis was carved over the following five years.

What makes it worth a detour is the painting. Zahari Zograf, the best-known name of the Bulgarian Revival and the man who painted the porch at Rila, worked here in 1847–48 across the interior and the exterior walls. Among the saints and the Last Judgement he included a group portrait of the monks who were living at the monastery while he worked, which is an unusual thing to find on a church wall and tells you something about how the Revival thought of itself.

The monastery also keeps an icon of the Three-Handed Virgin, said to have come from Mount Athos when the community was founded, and it is the object most Bulgarian visitors are actually here for. The other thread is political: in the early 1870s Vasil Levski set up one of his secret revolutionary committees among the monks, part of the network he built across the country before he was caught and hanged in 1873. Monasteries in Bulgaria were rarely only monasteries.