Qualla: Church of Saint George, Sofia

Church of Saint George, Sofia: Introduction

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Walk into the courtyard between the Hotel Balkan and the Bulgarian presidency in central Sofia, and you drop several meters out of the modern city. The pavement levels of two thousand years ago lie below the streets you arrived on, and the first thing you see down there is a fat little cylinder of red brick with a low dome, sitting in a sunken garden. This is the Church of Saint George. Constantine the Great walked past it. So did Galerius, the emperor who issued the edict that ended the persecution of Christians a few blocks from here. The building has been called Roman, Christian, mosque, and church again, and inside its single round room the layers of paint that mark each phase are still there, peeling back at the corners like pages.

Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Church of Saint George, Sofia: When Sofia Was Serdica

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mark Ahsmann, CC BY-SA 4.0. The brick rotunda went up in the early fourth century, when this city was Serdica, capital of the Roman province of Dacia Mediterranea, and an imperial residence important enough that Constantine reportedly considered making it his eastern capital before settling on Byzantium. It...

Image: Mark Ahsmann | CC BY-SA 4.0

Church of Saint George, Sofia: Paint on Paint on Paint

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mpb eu at Bulgarian Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Five layers of fresco have been identified on the interior. The deepest is Roman-Byzantine floral work from the fourth century, faint but legible. Above that, tenth-century Bulgarian medieval painting from the golden age of the First Bulgarian Empire, when emperors Simeon, Peter,...

Image: Mpb eu at Bulgarian Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Church of Saint George, Sofia: Relics and Looters

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elena Chochkova, CC BY-SA 3.0. For a stretch of the medieval period, the church held the relics of John of Rila, patron saint of Bulgaria. Legend says they were used to cure the Byzantine emperor Manuel Komnenos. In 1183, allied Serbian and Hungarian troops under Bela III of Hungary sacked Sofia and carried th...

Image: Elena Chochkova | CC BY-SA 3.0

Church of Saint George, Sofia: Mosque, Then Quiet, Then Church

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dennis G. Jarvis, CC BY-SA 2.0. In the sixteenth century, the Ottomans converted the rotunda to a mosque. The frescoes were painted over, the dome whitewashed, and for several centuries the building served Sofia's Muslim community. In the mid-nineteenth century it was abandoned along with several other former c...

Image: Dennis G. Jarvis | CC BY-SA 2.0