Monastery of Saint Spas

Overview

Sopot Monastery "Ascension of Christ" or "Saint Spas" is a Bulgarian Orthodox monastery in the Plovdiv diocese of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. It is located near the town of Sopot at the foot of Stara Planina.

Moved to its present place at the end of the 14th century, it is a continuation of the other monastery of the same name in the Sopot land, which disappeared around the end of the 14th century during the Ottoman invasion. It can be assumed that the monastery "St. Spas" was "royal" - it was donated with rights and property by King Smilets, for which the monastery kept several (probably two or three) certificates confirming the donations. The diplomas were kept in the monastery until 1870, after which they were handed over by the abbot of the Revival Naiden Gerov to publish. Since then, their traces have been lost and are most likely stored in some secret archive in Russian (former Soviet) bookstores.

Throughout the Turkish rule, the monastery was a supporter of the Bulgarian spirit and literary tradition. There was a scriptorium (a place for copying books) in the monastery - several dozen books have survived from it, the oldest of which dates back to 1480. As noted in the "Essay on Travels in European Turkey", the Russian researcher of literary antiquities Viktor Grigorovich in 1845, in the Sopot monastery "St. Spas" was always served in Church Slavonic and never in Greek. This is confirmed by the liturgical books preserved in it, which are exclusively in Church Slavonic. Here are copied both known to science "Sopot revisions" of "Slavo-Bulgarian History" from 1828 and 1845.

In this monastery Vasil Levski accepted the monastic order and the name Ignatius on December 7, 1858, and later used it as one of his many refuges.

In 1875, the revolutionary Todor Kableshkov swore in the monastery the members of the renewed Sopot Revolutionary Committee.

The church and the fountain in the monastery were rebuilt in 1879 by Abbot Raphael, whose tomb is located behind the altar. The painter Georgi Danchov, an ally of Levski, painted the church. Next to the south wall of the church is the large bell, cast in Craiova in 1875 and donated to the monastery by citizens of Sopot living in Romania.