The Revival and UNESCO

The modern transformation of Rila Monastery: the catastrophic fire of 1833 that left little standing but the Hrelyo Tower; the great nineteenth-century rebuilding (1834–1862), driven by the Bulgarian National Revival, with Neofit Rilski among its promoters and the master-builder Alexi Rilets among its makers; the new main church of the Nativity of the Virgin with its celebrated frescoes by Zahari Zograf; and the monastery’s inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1983 as the symbol of the Bulgarian Renaissance.

Tradition: Bulgarian Orthodox

The Fire of 1833

On 12 January 1833 a catastrophic fire swept through Rila Monastery and destroyed most of the complex. When it was over, essentially only the medieval Hrelyo Tower (1334–1335) and the small church beside it remained standing; the residential ranges, the main church, and most of the monastery’s fabric were gone (Rila Monastery, Wikipedia; rilskimanastir.org; on the tower, see The Heart of Bulgaria). The disaster came, providentially, at a moment when Bulgaria’s national and cultural energies were beginning to stir, and the rebuilding of Rila became one of the great collective undertakings of the age.

The Rebuilding and the National Revival

The reconstruction proceeded over nearly three decades, roughly 1834–1862, funded by donations gathered from wealthy Bulgarians and ordinary believers across the whole of the Bulgarian lands — a national effort that made the rebuilt monastery a monument of the Bulgarian National Revival (Vazrazhdane), the nineteenth-century reawakening of Bulgarian culture, education, and self-consciousness under Ottoman rule (Rila Monastery, Wikipedia; UNESCO World Heritage List, no. 216). Among the leading promoters of the donation drive was Neofit Rilski (1793–1881), the prominent monk and educator — “the patriarch of Bulgarian teachers” — who founded a school at the monastery and was a central figure of the Revival (Rila Monastery, Wikipedia).

The fabric was raised by Bulgarian master craftsmen of the National Revival building schools, chief among them the master-builder Alexi Rilets (Aleksi Rilets), with others such as Pavel Milenkov, who contributed their work to the rebuilding (Rila Monastery, Wikipedia). [Disputed: the master-builder of the rebuilt complex is most often named Alexi Rilets; some sources give variant attributions (e.g., “Pavel Ioanov”/Pavel Milenkov) for the main church, likely reflecting the several craftsmen involved.] The result is the monastery as it stands today — a great fortified quadrangle of striped arcaded galleries enclosing a courtyard, one of the masterworks of Bulgarian Revival architecture.

The Main Church and the Frescoes

At the center of the rebuilt courtyard rises the new main church, the Church of the Nativity of the Virgin (Rozhdestvo Bogorodichno), built 1834/1835–1837 in a five-domed, Athonite-influenced cross-form with three altars and richly arcaded exterior porticoes (Rila Monastery, Wikipedia). [Disputed: the main church’s construction years are given as 1834–1837 or 1835–1837 in different sources.] Its glory is its fresco program, painted by the leading masters of the Samokov school — above all the brothers Zahari Zograf and Dimitar Zograf — together with painters from Bansko, Samokov, and Razlog; the frescoes, completed around 1846, are among the most celebrated achievements of nineteenth-century Bulgarian religious art, covering the church and its porticoes with a vast cycle of biblical and apocalyptic scenes (Rila Monastery, Wikipedia). The relics of St. John of Rila are kept in the church, the founder at the heart of the house that bears his name (see The Journeys of the Relics).

UNESCO World Heritage Status

Rila Monastery was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1983 (at the seventh session of the World Heritage Committee), as site no. 216, under cultural criterion (vi) (UNESCO World Heritage List, no. 216). The grounds of the inscription are telling: UNESCO recognized Rila not primarily as a relic of medieval civilization but as a symbol of the nineteenth-century Bulgarian Renaissance — the rebuilt complex (which UNESCO dates 1834–1862) embodying the reassertion of Slavic-Bulgarian cultural identity after centuries of foreign domination, and standing for the “uninterrupted historical continuity” of Bulgarian spiritual and artistic life from St. John’s tenth-century foundation to the modern nation (UNESCO no. 216, official description). The monastery is among Bulgaria’s foremost cultural monuments and pilgrimage destinations, drawing visitors and the faithful in great numbers to the relics and the frescoes alike.

Continuity Through Rupture

The deep meaning of the 1833 fire and the rebuilding is one of continuity through catastrophe. The medieval monastery was almost entirely lost; what stands is overwhelmingly a nineteenth-century creation. Yet the rebuilding was understood, by those who carried it out and by UNESCO long after, not as a replacement but as a renewal — the same monastery, in unbroken line from the hermit’s tomb, raised again by the nation whose heart it had always been (see The Heart of Bulgaria and John of Rila in Bulgarian Identity). The fire that nearly ended Rila became, in the event, the occasion of its most glorious rebirth, and the monastery passed from the Ottoman twilight into the modern era as the abiding sign of Bulgarian faith and identity.

Neofit Rilski, Grammarian of a Nation

The role of Neofit Rilski (1793–1881) in the rebuilding cannot be separated from his larger place in the National Revival, for the man who promoted the donation drive at Rila was the same who gave the modern Bulgarian language its first grammar. In 1835 Neofit published his Bolgarska gramatika, a work of some 211 pages and the first grammar of the modern Bulgarian tongue — a foundational act for a people then seeking to reclaim its language from Greek-dominated church and school (Neofit Rilski, Wikipedia; Neofit Rilski, Britannica). In the same period he became the first teacher of the first Bulgarian secular school, founded at Gabrovo in 1835, and he prepared the textbooks — primers, instructional tables, a catechism — by which a generation would learn to read in its own speech; he later made the first translation of the New Testament into modern Bulgarian (Neofit Rilski, Wikipedia). It is this that earned him the title “patriarch of Bulgarian teachers.” That the rebuilding of Rila was driven by such a man is itself revealing: the restoration of the monastery and the making of a national language and school system were, in his life, a single Revival project — the recovery of a people’s faith, letters, and self-consciousness as one work.

The Frescoes: The Last Judgment and the Wheel of Life

The fresco program of the rebuilt church and its galleries is the supreme monument of the Samokov school, and its subjects repay attention. Alongside the canonical biblical cycles, the open exterior galleries carry the moral and apocalyptic themes for which Zahari Zograf (1810–1853) and his fellow masters became renowned: vast compositions of the Last Judgment and the Apocalypse of St. John, with their ranks of the saved and the damned and their bat-winged demons, and archetypal images of catastrophe — visions of hell and of the world’s end set to instruct and admonish the worshipper passing beneath them (Zahari Zograf, Wikipedia; Zahari Zograf, OrthodoxWiki). Among the most celebrated of these didactic motifs in Zograf’s broader work is the Wheel of Life (the “Cycle of Life”), an allegory of human existence from cradle to grave that became his best-known image in modern Bulgarian culture (Zahari Zograf, Wikipedia). Characteristic of the Samokov school is the mingling of sacred iconography with scenes of ordinary Bulgarian life — a frank, vivid, didactic art, executed by painters drawn from Samokov, Bansko, and Razlog, that spoke directly to the people who had paid for the church and who came to pray in it.

The Museum and the Rafail Cross

The modern monastery preserves its treasures in an Ecclesiastical-Historical Museum whose collections run to many thousands of objects. Its most famous single treasure is the Rafail Cross (Rafail’s Cross), a double-sided wooden crucifix carved from a single piece of wood by the monk Rafail of Bansko between roughly 1790 and 1802. Working with fine burins and magnifying lenses, the monk covered the cross — about 81 by 43 centimeters — with scores of miniature religious scenes and several hundred tiny human figures; tradition holds that he lost his eyesight upon completing the labor in 1802 (Rafail’s Cross, Wikipedia; rilskimanastir.org). The cross is a fitting emblem of the monastery’s artistic culture: a work of monastic patience and devotion in which an entire scriptural world is compressed, by a craftsman’s discipline, into the compass of a single piece of wood.

The Present Complex

The monastery one walks through today is an architectural ensemble on a grand scale. Around an irregular courtyard of roughly 8,800 square meters rise the four- and five-storey residential ranges, containing on the order of 300 monastic cells along with four chapels, the abbot’s quarters, a refectory, a kitchen, the library, and guest rooms for donors and pilgrims (Rila Monastery, Wikipedia; rilamonastery.info). The wings present fortified outer walls to the mountain and turn inward through tiers of arcaded loggias — turned wooden columns and barrel-vaulted, painted arches in the characteristic black-and-white striped manner of Bulgarian Revival architecture — so that the visitor moves from an austere exterior into a courtyard of color and light, with the domed church and the medieval Hrelyo Tower at its heart (Rila Monastery, Wikipedia; engineers-and-architects sources). The whole is at once a fortress, a place of worship, and a museum of the National Revival’s art — the physical form, in stone and timber and paint, of the continuity the monastery embodies.

See Also

References

  • Rila Monastery. Wikipedia. (The 1833 fire; the 1834–1862 rebuilding; Neofit Rilski; Alexi Rilets; the Nativity of the Virgin church 1834/35–1837; Zahari and Dimitar Zograf and the Samokov-school frescoes, completed c. 1846.)
  • UNESCO World Heritage List, no. 216 (Rila Monastery), official description (whc.unesco.org/en/list/216). (Inscription 1983, criterion (vi); the monastery as symbol of the Bulgarian Renaissance; rebuilding dated 1834–1862; “uninterrupted historical continuity.”)
  • Rila Monastery official site (rilskimanastir.org). (The fire, the rebuilding, and the main church.)
  • Bozhkov, Atanas. Bulgarian Art and standard histories of the Samokov school (for Zahari Zograf and the National Revival frescoes; cited as the scholarly anchor for the fresco program).
  • Neofit Rilski. Wikipedia; Neofit Rilski. Encyclopaedia Britannica (britannica.com). (The 1835 Bolgarska gramatika, first grammar of modern Bulgarian, 211 pp.; the first Bulgarian secular school at Gabrovo, 1835; the textbooks and New Testament translation; “patriarch of Bulgarian teachers.”)
  • Zahari Zograf. Wikipedia; Zahari Zograf. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org). (The Samokov school; the Last Judgment, Apocalypse, and hell scenes in the open galleries; the Wheel of Life; the mingling of sacred and everyday subjects.)
  • Rafail’s Cross. Wikipedia; Rila Monastery official site (rilskimanastir.org), Church History Museum. (The double-sided wooden cross carved by the monk Rafail of Bansko, c. 1790–1802; ~81 × 43 cm; hundreds of miniature figures; the monk’s loss of sight in 1802; the Ecclesiastical-Historical Museum collections.)
  • Rila Monastery. Wikipedia; rilamonastery.info; e-a-a.com (Engineers and Architects of America). (The present complex: courtyard of ~8,800 m²; ~300 cells; four chapels, refectory, kitchen, library, guest rooms; four-/five-storey arcaded ranges in the striped Revival style.)