Tsarevets

Worth a detour

A fortified hill in a bend of the Yantra that was the seat of Bulgarian power for two centuries, with a walk up to a cathedral whose interior will divide your party. Much of the masonry is twentieth-century rebuilding, which is worth knowing in advance — come for the site and the view, not for authenticity.

Story

Background

From 1185 until 1393 this hill was the principal stronghold of the Second Bulgarian Empire, and the city on it was the capital. Excavation has found the outlines of some four hundred houses, more than twenty churches and four monasteries packed inside the walls, with the royal and patriarchal palaces on the summit. Below the north wall is Execution Rock, where traitors went over into the river; a patriarch was killed there in 1300.

It ended in July 1393, after a three-month Ottoman siege, when the fortress was taken and burnt. What you walk on now is largely a reconstruction carried out between 1930 and 1981 — the walls, the gates, and Baldwin's Tower, which is a 1930 invention on the spot where the captured Latin emperor Baldwin I is said to have died in Kaloyan's prison. Knowing that changes the visit but does not spoil it; the shape of the place and the way the river wraps round it are entirely real.

At the top, the Patriarchal Cathedral of the Ascension was rebuilt in 1981 and painted in 1985 by Teofan Sokerov in a flatly modernist style — grey, angular, and nothing like the Orthodox interiors visitors arrive expecting. People either think it is the best thing on the hill or resent it. Go up and decide; either way the view over Veliko Tarnovo from the terrace is the reason to have climbed.