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The monastery church has undulating lines, combining red and black designs with arches and a diversity of cupolas. Richly coloured frescos shelter beneath the porch and within the interior - a mixture of scenes from rural life and Orthodox iconography, executed by muralists from Razlog, Bansko and Samokov, including nineteenth-century Bulgaria's greatest artist Zahari Zograf. The murals on the church's exterior include archetypal images of cataclysm: the fall of Constantinople, apocalypses and visions of hell, plagued by the bat-winged demons that seemingly loomed large in the Bulgarian imagination. The wrongdoings of sinners are portrayed with a love of grotesque detail; one picture shows rich men quaffing wine around a table, ignoring the pleas of a begging leper whose legs are being gnawed by dogs. Inside the church, the iconostasis is particularly splendid: almost 10m wide and covered by a mass of intricate carvings and gold leaf, it's one of the finest achievements of the Samokov woodcarvers. In front of the iconostasis, a wooden box hidden behind a curtain holds the holiest of the monastery's relics; a silver case containing the left hand of St John of Rila . The box is only opened up for the benefit of "real" pilgrims (monks are unlikely to be impressed by appeals from foreign tourists), who gaze upon the hand and cross themselves before taking away a wad of cotton wool which, by virtue of having spent time in proximity to the relic, is capable of sending those who sniff it into a heightened state of spiritual grace. Halfway down the nave, on the left-hand side as you face the iconostasis, a wooden drawer (often closed, so ask a monk to pull it out) holds a miraculous icon of the Virgin , a remarkably serene example of twelfth-century Byzantine icon painting, presented to the monastery by the then Emperor Theodore Comnenus. Mounted in an elaborate frame containing other saintly relics, the icon is paraded around the monastery courtyard on the occasion of the Feast of the Assumption (Golyama Bogoroditsa) on August 15. A chapel on the opposite side of the nave contains the heart of Tsar Boris III , buried beneath a simple wooden cross. Boris died of a mystery illness after a visit to Berlin in 1944, prompting many to speculate that he'd been poisoned by his Nazi hosts. After 1945, the Bulgarian Communists scattered his remains in the Iskar gorge in order to prevent his grave from becoming the focus of anti-Communist sentiment, but the former monarch's principal organ survived, to be ceremonially interred here in 1993. Beside the church rises Hrelyo's Tower , the sole remaining building from the fourteenth century, which you can sometimes ascend in order to visit the top-floor chapel. Its founder - a local noble - apocryphally took refuge as a monk here and was supposedly strangled in the tower; hence the inscription upon it: "Thy wife sobs and grieves, weeping bitterly, consumed by sorrow".
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