The Holy Virgin Church

The Church of the Dormition of the Most Holy Theotokos (Uspenie Bogorodichno), more commonly known as the Church of the Holy Mother of God (Sveta Bogoroditsa), is a late medieval Bulgarian church located in the northern part of the Old Town of Sozopol, in Sozopol Municipality, Burgas Region. It is one of the oldest and most artistically significant churches on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast, built in the 15th century on the site of an earlier Christian temple, with the earliest known written record of its existence dating to 1482. The church served as a monastic church — a metoch of the island monastery of St John the Forerunner on St Ivan Island — and is today an active Orthodox church and a protected monument of culture. In plan the church is a three-nave, single-apse pseudo-basilica. In keeping with the restrictions of the Ottoman period, it is embedded below ground level: the eastern wall stands at the level of the street running alongside it, and from the outside the building is barely distinguishable from a residential house. The roof is supported by wooden columns ending in old stone capitals, some of which can also be seen in the church courtyard. The interior has never been frescoed and bears no traces of earlier wall paintings. The church's outstanding artistic significance rests entirely on its exquisite carved-wood iconostasis, pulpit (ambon), and bishop's throne — works created by masters of the Debur School from Western Macedonia at the end of the 18th century. The iconostasis is executed in the richest plant ornamentation and incorporates numerous figurative compositions from Holy Scripture, and is considered one of the finest surviving examples of the late 18th-century Bulgarian woodcarving tradition: art historians have noted that the iconostasis of the Church of St Bogoritsa in Sozopol, together with that of the Samokov Metropolitan Church, stands among the most perfect specimens of the new direction in Bulgarian iconostasis art from the final decades of the 18th century, and that an exact copy of the Sozopol iconostasis was made for another Bulgarian church of the same period. In 1927 the church was declared a "national antiquity." In 1958 it was confiscated from the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and in 1962 was declared an architectural monument of culture of national significance. In 1967 the Ministry of Culture declared the church's iconostasis an artistic monument of culture of national significance. More recently the church was returned to the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and is today once again an active place of worship.