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March 1998: The Monastic Heartland

Plovdiv has gone through several name changes starting with Phillipolis – Phillip The Second of Macedonia arrived here in 343 BC. The Romans called it Trimontium, in many ways more apt since there are three small hills standing close together on the vast expanse of the Marica plain. It then revived the name of Phillipolis before becoming today's Plovdiv. The old town is a cobbled maze of 18th and 19th century houses, mainly National Revival architecture with bay windows, curved eaves and small courtyards. The Ethnographic Museum is a merchant's town house of the mid nineteenth century and each room retains its original furnishing. One can picture the business deals conducted on divans around tables, stacked with coffee cups, the rooms shrouded in thick veils of tobacco. Lots of cafes and restaurants give it a striking resemblance to Montmatre without the Sacre Coeur. Our stop over was to visit Batchovo Monastery, half an hour to the South.

If Rila is the King of Bulgarian monasteries, the Batchovo Monastery of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin is the Queen. Nestled in the valley of the River Chaya outside the town of Assenograd, it has a softness, almost a femininity about it. Founded in 1083 by two Georgian monks, Batchovo is more in the tradition of Armenian and Syria monasteries, built in rows of stone and gentle coloured red brick. The arched entrance leads into a courtyard where there is a pretty church of beautiful dimensions. In fact it is two churches joined together; the 13th century winter church of the Holy Archangels, a small temple resting on a stone arcade pedestal with shady painted arches, and the early 17th century Cathedral Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, a lovely domed Athonite design.

Two of the donors of this church were Georgi and his son Constantine, whose generosity is recorded by a portrait of them. Georgi wears a long blue gown with twelve gold buttons on each sleeve and twenty down the front. Over this, he sports a short sleeved patterned cloak with a red lining. Not to be outdone, Constantin wears a gown of red material with vivid white floral patterns in diagonal diamond shapes, the same amount of gold buttons and a very trendy gold belt. His cloak is black with a fur lining. Both of them wear the latest in red shoes and large red hats trimmed in fur.

Always flourishing – in 1706, a visiting Frenchman found over 100 monks in residence, together with a large library of manuscripts – in the nineteenth century it became so popular that a third church was added, St Nicholas and the Holy Trinity, to accommodate all the worshippers. Batchovo retains some superb examples of early frescoes, particularly in the refectory where on the walls and the vaulted ceiling are images of writers and philosophers like Aristotle, Socrates and Aristophanes.

Zahari Zograph came here as a young man to decorate the new church of St Nicholas in 1838 where his usual gory imagination came into play with a fine Last Judgement. Later on he painted the frescoes in the Narthex of the Winter Church with scenes from Proverbs and Miracles. Batchovo also houses a valuable collection of manuscripts, old icons, jewellery, coins and church plate.

My previous visit had been memorable. I was invited to lunch by the Abbot, a splendidly bearded figure in his early sixties. After due formalities in signing his visitors book, we were ushered into lunch in the new refectory which had generously been donated by a Bulgarian company. We were sat down at a marble table (which catered for at least fifty people) and served with what could only be described as a feast. As guest of honour, I sat next to the Abbot and conversed through an interpreter.

Conversation flowed easily after one or two glasses of the monastery's home made Rakia, quite the best I have ever tasted.
"What", I asked, "are the Abbot's hobbies?"
He paused to light a cigarette and pronounced:
"Collecting stamps". After a further pause, he said: "and old nails".
"Old nails?"
"Yes, they tell you a lot about history."
I was out of my depth and clumsily replied that I knew an Abbot who flew aeroplanes.
"I am already close to God and have no need to get that close", he replied with a twinkle.
"But not that far from death not to need a dozen good nails for your coffin….?"
"Boy, more Rakia for English!"

The monastery wine was then produced, their own Mavrud, which is the local grape, and several glasses were downed in toasts. His lay secretary, a man in his late fifties who had up till then had played the part of a discrete major domo, stood up and sang a religious refrain in a beautiful tenor voice. My face at this stage was the same colour as The Abbot's purple hat!

Abbot Naum or Igumen, as the title is called in Bulgarian, left an indelible impression on me as both a man of God and a humanist who both understood and enjoyed the world, When I left, tottering giddily around the courtyard on slippery cobbles, he presented me with a bottle of the monastery's Rakia and Mavrud.

Leaving Plovdiv early on Friday morning, we headed across the plain until the snowbound ridges of the Balkan Mountains gradually came into to focus through the morning haze. Passing through Karlovo, famous to the world for its white wines and more famous to Bulgarians as the birthplace of Vassil Levski, we hugged the ankles of the mountains eastwards along roads bordered with wild forsythia until turning North to Shipka.

Shipka Church lies at the entrance to Shipka pass. The valley is a gloomy place with the atmosphere of a Scottish glen steeped in blood. The Church itself was completed in 1902 and built in traditional Russian style to commemorate the valiant defence of the pass in the Russo- Turkisk war of 1877. To appreciate its significance, one needs to go up to the top of the pass to understand how strategic this place is. It dominates both the Northern and Southern Bulgarian plains with their rich harvests of tobacco, vines and fruit. Who controlled the pass, controlled Bulgaria.

In the winter of 1877, three Russian regiments supported by 6,000 Bulgarian volunteers held off ferocious attacks from the Turkish army. When they ran out of ammunition, they hurled frozen corpses and rocks down onto the attackers.

Now it is clear why Shipska Church was built and why it is Russian in style. It three golden cupolas rise high above the trees, giving it the feel as much of a memorial as of a church. Inside, the names of the Russian dead are engraved on marble plaques. Down in the crypt, there is a splendid photograph of the opening ceremony with a cast of bemedalled soldiers. Standing in the middle are five women in pretty white dresses – could they have been Czar Nicholas's daughters? One officer, covered in impressive decorations, stands out for his great height – he towers over the others and must have been a good seven and a half feet tall.

Before we left Shipska, Efrem got his coffee gadget out. This is an ingenuous attachment, which he plugs into the cigarette lighter and boils water in. Impromptu cups of coffee are a regular feature of life on the road with him.

Descending through thick beech woods, still deep in snow, we turned East just before Gabrovo and backtracked into the mountains. There we found the Monastery of Sokolski of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, balanced precariously on a limestone crag above the village. According to local legend, it was given the name Sokolski due to the great numbers of falcons which inhabited the clefts and crannies in the surrounding rock walls. Started by two monks, Joseph and Agapius, the first buildings were erected in 1834 and added to from then on. At the beginning of this century a fire nearly burnt the whole place down but it was skilfully restored without a hint of this disaster.

An unprepossessing entrance leads into an enchanting three sided courtyard with small yew hedges laid out in patterns like an Elizabethan herb garden. A pillared fountain gushes water from all sides in the centre of the garden, two of its eagle motifs representing local resistance heroes. The monastery is classic wooden cloister; yet, on the main building, the central architecture is gabled like a Dutch house. The church is built in a depression in the North limestone wall and is very hard to see from ground level except for its brightly coloured cupola. It was bitingly cold with the north wind howling through the fir tress above the church.

Further down the valley is the Dryanovo Monastery of the Archangel Michael at the junction of two fast flowing mountain streams. Surrounded by almost vertical limestone cliffs, easily reaching 300 feet, the monastery is entirely screened from the outside world. The main entrance is rather disappointing since many of the buildings are new. I found it best to walk through it, down some steps, which lead on to a rickety, wooden bridge and then turn around and view it from that direction. The walls rise up from the riverbank and the protruding wooden structures would have been lavatories; probably still are!

Founded on the present site in 1701, the Monastery became one of the largest in the Turnovo region, spreading into two vast courtyards with two churches and ninety cells and guestrooms. Alas, it was not to survive the Uprising. The Abbot housed the secret headquarters of the Bulgarian Revolutionary Central Committee of Turnovo and also extended his support to storing food, arms and gunpowder. In an epic nine day battle waged by the insurgents against the regular Turkish army, only 47 out of 200 survived and the monastery was burnt to the ground. Only the church was left standing. Tragically four cartloads of incunabula and one of manuscripts went up in flames as well.

The church is a classic shape; it would sit well in any small American town. That is until one goes inside and sees that the internal construction is completely different. It is a one-knave structure with the interior broken up by pilasters and arcades into square fields crowned by blind cupolas upon pendants.

Heading on to Killifarevo through rolling hills, I noticed how the villages changed from clumps of houses all clustered about a central point to being spread out along a single road as in Romania. They are sleepy places with a few children sitting on walls, watching the world go by; we were probably the only car to pass by for several hours. Tucked up in a valley to the south of the town, with the River Bilitza running alongside it, the Kilifarevo Monastery of St Demetrius can only be approached over a narrow wooden footbridge. It is wonderfully peaceful place and, as I entered it, a dear little nun came up to me and asked whether I was German.
"No, I'm sorry, " I said, thinking that I had deprived her of conversation in her one foreign language. "I'm English"
"Oh, good, I can speak to you in English!"
"How many are you?"
"Oh, there are now only three of us."
"Any novices?"
"Not at the moment" and she looked up towards the mountains for some divine intervention.

We went into the church and she explained the iconastasis to me and told me about the history. Founded in around 1350 by St Theodossius and his disciple, Romil of Vidin, the early monastery was turned into a fortress to resist the 14th century Turkish invasion. Despite spirited local resistance, it was destroyed and reinvented itself again in 1442. Then it was back to the drawing board when the Turks torched it in 1596, yet again necessitating in a rebuild. At the end of the 18th century, Kurdjalis, an autonomous unit of the Porte's army and a particularly vicious lot specialising in sharp blades, plundered it on several occasions and the church as it is today was finished in 1844.

In the middle of the 19th century, over 40 clergy lived here and somehow it escaped the "yik terasslary" of the Uprising – this is shorthand in Turkish for "burn, terrorise and destroy". As I left, I gingerly crossed myself, hoping that it was the right thing to do. My guide beamed at me and said:
"You are not Orthodox"
"No, I'm Protestant"
"Well that explains you making such a hash of crossing yourself"
I felt rather sheepish and turned to go.
"Now, my dear, look at me and I'll teach you how to do it properly. See the fingers of the right hand – well, the thumb and the first two represent the holy trinity, God the Father, His son and the Holy Spirit. The last two are also held together to show the two natures of Christ; Christ the human being and Christ the Son of God"

I nodded and got my hand organised.
"Now you hold it to your forehead – hard – to get in touch with your mind. Then you lower your hand to your tummy – again hard - to get in touch with your heart. Then move your hand to your right shoulder, and finally, by crossing it over to the left shoulder, you have made the sign of the cross which Christ carried for us."

After two practice sessions, she gave me top marks and shuffled off to feed her puppy, which had been biting my trouser leg throughout this impromptu period of religious instruction!

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