Monasteries and Frescoes

James Crouchman:  "Bulgaria’s old monasteries and churches are places of beauty and tranquillity. Like time capsules they contain remnants of the country’s history, like the fragile medieval frescoes in the churches of Berende and Kalotina, dating back almost to the reign of the Asenov dynasty. 

But they also exhibit traces of recent, more local history; the flowers just laid out for Easter on the small table in the tiny, miraculously-beautiful church of the ascension in Vasilovtsi full of vibrant wall paintings, the paper icons left by the window to catch the light in semi-abandoned St. Iliya, Gorochevtsi, and the notices of remembrance pinned to a church door under a simple but lovely romanesque arch in Rayanovtsi. To paraphrase Rebecca West, what history means in flesh and blood, but also in stone and paint, candlewax and overgrown grass.

And visiting these places I met people who help keep that history alive: the lady in Kalotina who keeps the key to the extraordinary 14th-century of St. Nicholas on a Vienna keyring from her son living in Austria, the uncle of a friend in Berende who recounted the story of a local priest getting drunk and whitewashing the church walls, and the man in Rayanovtsi who told me there was also a church in that village (almost no photos of it exist on the internet and I sometimes wonder if I dreamed it) and said if I drank from the village well I would one day return there."