Banya Bashi Mosque (2 Knyaginya Maria Louise Blvd., Sofia) — Once there were 70 mosques in Sofia, but today the Banya Bashi Mosque is the only one still functioning. It was designed in 1576, by the greatest of all Ottoman architects, Mimar Sinan, who also built the Sultan Selim Mosque in Edirne and the Blue […]
Alexander Nevsky Crypt Icon Museum (Aleksander Nevsky Square, Sofia) — during the construction of Nevski Cathedral, plans were originally made to bury the country’s kings at one of its levels. But such plans were never carried out. For that reason, in 1965, the space under the church was converted into a branch of the National […]
Alexander Nevsky Cathedral (Aleksander Nevski Square, Sofia) — The gold-domed Alexander Nevsky Cathedral was built in the early 20th century in memory of the 200,000 Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian and Bulgarian soldiers, who died in the Russo-Turkish War, 1877–1878. It is one of the largest Eastern Orthodox cathedrals in the world. The cathedral’s gold-plated dome is […]
Bulgaria, one of the larger Balkan countries, shares borders with Romania, Serbia, Macedonia, Greece, and Turkey (as well as the Black Sea acting as its lengthy eastern coastline). It is perhaps the least-known among the countries in that region, whose history dates back to the Roman Empire, when a town then called “Serdica” (now Sofia […]