Church Saint Marina Plovdiv city

Overview

St. Marina is an Orthodox church in the city of Plovdiv, Bulgaria, a metropolitan cathedral of the Plovdiv diocese of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.

Originally, this church was located by the Maritsa River, on the site of the Imaret Mosque. When the mosque was built in 1444, the Ottomans destroyed the temple and allowed the Christians to build a new one, but elsewhere. Thus, St. Marina was rebuilt where it is today, south of the Three Hills. This legend is doubtful, because until the 15th century the site of the present-day Imaret Mosque was far beyond the city limits.

According to Stefan Gerlach, who visited Plovdiv in 1578, there were eight churches in the city, the main one being St. Marina. Worship services were held there regularly; there was also the seat of the metropolitan.

An inscription deleted in 1906 indicated that the church was completely renovated in 1561. During the time of Metropolitan Neophyte of Plovdiv (1698 - 1711) the building burned down in a fire. Fundraising for a new building began in 1721 and led some poor Plovdiv residents to complain to the Ottoman authorities that local chorbadjii Andon Hadji, Konstantin Mavrodiuglu and Panayani had imposed an extraordinary tax on them for this purpose and that the chorbadjii had been punished. The church was completed and consecrated in 1783 with the patronage of Ivan Koyumdzhioglu, who moved to Plovdiv from Lozengrad, whose grave stood in the churchyard until 1852.

In its present form, "St. Marina" existed from 1851 - 1856, when Bratsigovo masters led by Nikola Tomchev (1797 - 1868) rebuilt it, with stone masonry. Since at that time the Ottoman authorities no longer restricted the construction of church buildings, the new building clearly exceeded the size of the old one and was crowned with a dome. The consecration was performed by the then Metropolitan Chrysanthemum on the day of St. St. Constantine and Helena (May 21), 1856.

"St. Marina" remained a cathedral of the Plovdiv Patriarchal Metropolitanate until the anti-Greek riots in 1906, when it passed under the authority of the Bulgarian Exarchate. A report of the Plovdiv metropolitanate to the Sofia Synod of August 5, 1906, states: "After the rally, which ended about 11 o'clock before noon [on July 16, 1906], the crowd unanimously shouted: “And set out for this church together and also took it without any resistance, shouting and waiting for a prayer service .... After a long time ... a sakelarium D. Chukurliev was found and brought to the church, who performed a prayer service. in silence. And there was no incident here, except where in the beginning - during the capture of the church - the Greek church books were torn. After the prayer, a temporary board of trustees was also elected. As soon as this church was captured, a large crowd rushed into the building where the Greek metropolitanate was located and began to smash and ruin indiscriminately everything in it - the windows, various books, mobile phones, etc., but all this was stopped by the military. power and a guard, who kept the further destruction of the Metropolis and everything else. "

The temple holiday is July 17, when the church honors the memory of the great martyr Marina of Antioch. A part of its holy relics is kept in the temple as a great jewel.

The church building was a basilica typical of the Revival period, consisting of three naves, separated by two rows of columns with capitals and semicircular arches between them. The dome has a multi-walled shape.

On its western side, the temple has an open colonnade-vestibule, painted with biblical scenes by the Edirne painter Stefan K. Nikitas in 1858. There are a total of 29 scenes, 24 of which are Old Testament: Solomon's court, the suffering Job, David defeats Goliath, Samson kills the lion, the brass serpent, the finding of Moses in the river, Moses receives the tablets, the prayer of Moses, an angel of the Lord blocks the way of Balaam, Joseph's brothers sell him to Egypt, Isaac blesses Jacob, the expulsion of Ishmael and his mother Hagar, Lot flees from Sodom , Cain kills Abel, the fall of Adam and Eve, the global flood. "The murals show the obvious influence of the illustrations in a bible, freely colored by the painter."

The domed vault in the middle of the vestibule was probably painted by Stefan Andonov in 1866. The images in the semicircular fields above the doors were added around 1910 by Georgi Ksafov from Stanimaka (1856 - 1931). His work was also the mural "Resurrection of Christ" on the courtyard wall opposite the main entrance of the temple, which was later repainted. The artist Haralampi Tachev painted the interior of the church in 1929 - 1931.

In 2011 the church building underwent major repairs: the roof was repaired, the floor was with new marble slabs, the decorative friezes and edging on the walls and the whole arches were covered with church-like murals, while the fresco icons with images of saints were preserved. .

In the northern part of the yard rises a six-storey wooden bell tower, about 17 m high. Made of solid oak wood, it is a one-of-a-kind work of church construction from the XIX century. It was restored in 1953. All 8 bells located on top of it , are the work of the famous foundry family Veleganovi. The largest of them weighs 180 kg, and the smallest - only 5 kg. One has an inscription from 1869 - 1870 (it is assumed that the bell tower itself was built then). Today "St. Marina" is the Plovdiv church with the largest number of bells.