Boyana Church

Interesting facts

The narthex holds the oldest surviving image of St John of Rila, Bulgaria's most revered saint.

The portraits of the donors and of Tsar Constantine Tikh and Tsaritsa Irina are among the earliest known portraits of figures from Bulgarian history.

The anonymous team known as the Boyana Master trained in the Tarnovo school, and the church is that school's only fully preserved 13th-century monument.

Fragments of an earlier layer of 11th–12th-century paintings survive beneath the 1259 murals in the apse and on the north wall.

The church also keeps later paintings from the 14th, 16th–17th centuries and 1882, when its two patrons, St Nicholas and St Panteleimon, were painted.

Among the images are two rare depictions of Christ's face made without hands, the Holy Mandylion and the Holy Tile.

The ground floor of Kaloyan's addition is a family tomb with two arched burial niches, while the chapel above copies the plan of the older church.

The murals were first cleaned and restored in 1912–1915 by an Austrian and a Bulgarian specialist, and again in 1934 and 1944.

The full-length saints in the old church include ten warrior saints, while Christ Pantocrator fills the dome above a ring of angels.

Why it is worth it

Boyana Church is a small, rather modest-looking building of brick and stone in the Boyana quarter on the outskirts of Sofia. Inside it holds one of the most important cycles of medieval painting in Europe, and it has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1979.

The church grew in three stages. The oldest part, at the east end, is a tiny single-apse church from the late 10th or early 11th century. In the mid-13th century the sebastocrator Kaloyan, a cousin of the tsar, and his wife Desislava added a two-storey building to the west: a family burial chamber below and a chapel above. A further extension followed in the 19th century, paid for by the villagers. The donors' inscription on the north wall dates the painting of Kaloyan's church to 1259, in the reign of Tsar Constantine Tikh Asen.

Those 1259 murals are the reason to come. They were laid over an earlier layer of painting and cover the walls with 89 scenes and some 240 figures, and what sets them apart is how human the faces are: individual, alert, full of feeling in a way that anticipates later European painting. The portraits of Kaloyan and Desislava and of Tsar Constantine and Tsaritsa Irina on the north wall are among the most lifelike images of the period. In the narthex, eighteen scenes tell the life of Saint Nicholas, and the painter slipped in details of his own day — the ship in the Miracle at Sea has been compared to Venetian vessels. The artists are unknown; during restoration in 2006–2008 a scratched inscription reading "I, Vasiliy, inscribed" was found, though scholars disagree over whether it names the master.

It is managed by the National Historical Museum.

Getting there

The church stands in the Boyana district, about 8 km from the centre of Sofia. Sofia Airport (SOF) is about 14 km away.

Boyana Church

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

On these lists

From the encyclopaedia