The Town
Despite its antiquity as a settlement, the existing town is predominantly modern, as Panagyurishte was set ablaze by the Turks for its participation in the April Rising - the town was the base for Georgi Benkovski's cavalry division. The most obvious starting point is the austerely laid-out main square, pl. Pavel Bobekov - named after a local insurgent and overlooked from a hillside to the east by the Memorial to the April Rising , a towering structure typical of the part modernist, part Socialist Realist style that characterized Bulgaria's public monuments in the 1970s and 1980s. The memorial is reached by a processional stairway that runs past the Church of Sveta Bogoroditsa , partially burnt in the aftermath of the Rising. Patches of charred murals (immediately on the left as you enter) have been left in situ as a reminder of the conflagration. The rest of the interior was colourfully decorated by Samokov painters in the 1890s, covering the walls with a pictorial history of the life of the Virgin consisting of more than a hundred individual scenes - each inscribed with the name of the local benefactor who paid for it. West of the main square, ul. Raina Knyaginya heads uphill into what remains of the old town. The two towers of the colonnaded, turquoise-coloured Church of St George precede the Shtarbanova House at no. 26, home to a prominent member of the local rebel government during the Rising. The house forms one part of a complex of buildings holding the town museum (Tues-Sun 9am-noon & 2-5.30pm; US$1), that bristles with antique militaria, including a cherry-tree cannon. Opposite the church, across a small square, ul. Oborishte leads to the Raina Knyaginya House-Museum at no. 5 (Tues-Sun 9am-noon & 2-5pm; US$1). As a girl, Knyaginya was the rebels' flag-bearer, mockingly nicknamed knyaginya (princess) by her Turkish captors. Tortured in Plovdiv, and then exiled to Russia, she returned to Bulgaria after the Liberation to become a schoolteacher in Veliko Tarnovo. The house contains sepia family portraits alongside a "Liberty or Death" flag woven by Knyaginya herself in 1901, in memory of the one she had carried during the Rising. She is buried in the garden with her mother and father - the latter a casualty of the Rising.
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