TEMPLES OF THE MAJOR RELIGIONS IN SOFIA

Back Church St Nedelya

 

Church is the Metropolitan Cathedral Church of Sofia. Roman remains of the big communal building from the end of the third and beginning of the fourth centuries were found underneath. The present-day church was erected where the medieval church was and has stone foundations and a wooden construction.
It was built in the period 1856-1863. At the end of the nineteenth century it was rebuilt according to the design of the architect Nikola Lazarov. After the bloody coup on the 16th April 1925 which had many victims and caused a lot of structural damage, the church was restored according to the design of the architects Vasilyov and Tsolov. By the spring of 1933 almost a whole new central-cupola church had been built, with a height of 30 metres, a width of 15.50 metres and a cupola 31 metres high. The surviving two-row gilt iconostasis was returned. Some of its icons were painted by the prominent Bulgarian painter Stanislav Dospevski in the 1860s. At the same time the famous wood-carver and icon-painter Makriy Negriev decorated the column capitals and the narthex with a special mixture of lime, cotton and olive oil.

In the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, the church was called St. King because of the holy remains of the Serbian king Stefan Urosh II Milutin (1282-1321) which are preserved in a reliquary in front of the southern throne.