Rock-hewn Churches of Ivanovo
* This name is listed on the World Heritage List. ª The region is classified by UNESCO.
The rock churches of Ivanovo ( Bulgarian Ивановски скални църкви / Ivanovsky skalni zarkwi ), are a group of Orthodox churches, chapels and monasteries spaces together form the Ivanovo Monastery in northeastern Bulgaria.
Location
The rock churches of Ivanovo are located one kilometer east of the village of Ivanovo Oblast in the Russian, 22 kilometers southwest of the Danube city of Ruse in northeastern Bulgaria. Nearby are the ruins of the fortress Tscherwen. She was a strategically important and great city which housed a bishop seat of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church in the Middle Ages. The medieval capital of the Second Bulgarian Empire, Veliko Tarnovo is located approximately 90 km south of Ivanovo.
History
As early as the end of the 12th century inhabited individual hermits the natural caves of the mountains and dug this individual chambers in the soft limestone. The Hermit Joakim founded from the isolated chambers, the Archangel Michael Monastery, where the individual rooms were connected to each other partly through corridors (today many of these programs are again collapsed ).
The former Tsar Monastery, Stifter ( Ktitor ) included the Bulgarian Tsar Ivan Asen II and Ivan Alexander, was built between the 13th and the 17th century in the edge of a steep cliff of the mountains on the banks of the river Rusenski Lom. Thanks to their help, the monastery was target of the most outstanding contemporary artists in Bulgaria, the art school of Tarnovo.
In six churches and chapels of the complex frescoes of the 13th and 14th centuries have been preserved today. In its day, acting there artists today are not known by name.
The Rock Church of the Virgin Mary
The central monastery church in which there are the most important frescoes of the Virgin Mary is blessed and is also just " Zarkwata " ( Bulgarian for "the Church " ) called. It was carved in 38 m height above the road in the rock and consists of a naos, a narthex and an adjoining chapel.
The church is about 16 m long, 4 m wide and only 2.15 meters high. Your frescoes are divided into rectangular segments, which represent the last seven days of Christ's life and the life of John the Baptist. In the narthex there are the portraits of Tsar Ivan Alexander, the Empress Theodora and of some saints. The frescoes of the chapel show motifs from the earlier Syrian Christian hermits.
On October 22, 1979, the rock churches of Ivanovo by the UNESCO declared World Heritage Site. The frescoes of the Church of the Rock of the Virgin Mary, however, were already threatened at this time by light, moisture and temperature fluctuations and especially increasing tourism; therefore, they were locked up in the 1980s for the public. Around the turn of the millennium they were preserved complex, with the financial assistance of UNESCO and opened to the public again in 2002.
More images
Chapel
Paintings in the Naos
Ceiling Naos (detail)