Day 24: Churches and Monasteries

Today we visited Rila Monastery, the most visited site in Bulgaria, and Boyana Church, which includes the oldest and most brilliant of all the murals in the churches in this area (including Greece).

We first stopped off at Boyana Church. The church building is very short and plain because the Ottoman Turks required that the churches not recruit new believers and pretty much be out of sight. When we went into the church though, it was gorgeous. I couldn't take pictures inside, but they are similar to the pictures you will see for Rila Monastery in a minute. Our guide was very passionate about the church and would grab our arms and move us around the small little chapel to show us the different pictures of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. It was a very intense experience.

Outside the church were old grave stones from the 1000s AD (when the church was first constructed). We wandered around the grounds with our guide as he told us more of the history of the church. We could only go into the actual church for 10 minutes and only 10 of us at a time because they want to preserve these beautiful murals on the walls for as long as possible. We had seen many murals like this in Greece, but none so brilliant and so old. It was a very neat experience.

We then traveled two hours south of Sofia to see Rila Monastery. At the moment there are only 7 monks currently living in the monastery, but there are a ton of tourists. The church is, obviously, the main focus of this monastery and the pictures to the right come from this building. 

It was the largest church we have been in so far, but that is most likely due to the fact that the monastery was burned down in 1830 and rebuilt. The murals are very brilliant since the monastery is not very old, at least compared to the other monasteries and churches we have visited so far.

The thing you should notice is that the whole inside and outside of the church is covered in mural paintings. This is how Boyana Church looked in the inside as well as all the churches in the monasteries in Greece (Meteora, etc).

The top photograph is of a person who has died. The Orthodox Christians believe that for 40 days the soul wanders around trying to find it's place: heaven or hell. In this picture, the soul is in the middle (usually represented as a child) and the angel and devil are fighting over who gets the soul. You can notice in the hand of both the devil and angel are papers with writing of all the things the soul has done in the world.

Myra and I also got fried donuts, which are supposedly a specialty of this monastery, so I included a picture of us eating our donuts. They were good!

Cheers,

Ms. G

P.S. Hernan, Dominika, and Jazmin...this post has answered your questions about Bulgarian religion! Hope you three are having a nice summer!