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Nine kilometres south of Asenovgrad, the village of Bachkovo , with its stone houses overgrown with flowers, gives no indication of what to expect 1.5km further up the road at BACHKOVO MONASTERY ( Bachkovski manastir ; daily 6.30am-9pm). Gardiner's description of it as "a mixed bag of buildings - chapels, ossuaries, cloisters, cells - daubed with frescos more naive than artistic" doesn't do justice to Bulgaria's second largest monastery, which, like Rila, has been declared a world monument by UNESCO. It was founded in 1083 by two Georgians in the service of the Byzantine Empire, one of whom, Grigoriy Pakuryani, renounced the governorship of Smolyan and Adrianople to devote the remainder of his life to meditation. You enter the monastery through a small iron-plated door which opens onto a cobbled courtyard, kept free of grass and weeds by a solitary goat, and surrounded by wooden galleries. There's also a couple of fountains, where locals and pilgrims alike fill up their plastic bottles. The wall of the refectory on the left is covered with frescos providing a narrative of the monastery's history: they show Bachkovo roughly as it appears today, but watched by God's eye and a celestial Madonna and child, with pilgrims proceeding to a hill in the vicinity to place icons. Other frescos depict the slaying of the dragon: a powerful archetype in ancient European mythology, repeated in the image of the Thracian Rider, and later incorporated into Christian iconography, in which St George and St Demetrius perform similar symbolic acts. It can also be read as an allusion to the Turks who laid waste to Bachkovo in the early sixteenth century, and the patient restoration of the monastery by the Bulgarians. Though it's not immediately apparent, the monastery consists of two separate courtyards connected via the wing containing the seventeeth-century refectory ( trapeznitsa ), whose vaulted hall is decorated with a Tree of Isaiah and a Procession of the Miraculous Icon executed by pupils of Zahari Zograf. Unfortunately it's not open regularly and neither is the museum , a jumble of carved spoons, broken teapots, ecclesiastical hats and filigreed crosses. If the gate into the second courtyard is open, you can view one of Bachkovo's churches, Sveti Nikolai , whose porch features a fine Last Judgement , which includes portraits of the artist Zograf and two colleagues in the upper left-hand corner. The oldest building in the monastery is its principal church, Sveta Bogoroditsa , built in 1604. Frescos in the porch of its bell tower depict the horrors in store for sinners: among the scenes of retribution, a boyar (a medieval nobleman) is tormented on his deathbed by a demon dangling a doll-like figure over him (presumably representing the man's ailing soul), while women watch in horror. The entrance is more cheerful, with the Holy Trinity painted on strips set at angles in a frame, so that one sees God or Christ flanking a dove, depending on which side you approach from, like a medieval hologram. On the right of the nave as you enter is a fourteenth-century Georgian icon of the Virgin which legend claims to be an authentic portrait of Mary, painted by the Apostle Luke. The icon plays a central role in celebrations of the name-day of the Assumption of the Virgin (August 15), and a ritual procession to a chapel in the nearby hills 25 days after the Orthodox Easter.
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