1.Gregory Pakourianos' Foundation (1083)
Bachkovo Monastery was founded in 1083 by Gregory Pakourianos — a senior Byzantine official of Georgian descent — in the valley of the Chepelare river above Stanimaka (today's Asenovgrad). At that time these lands were under Byzantine rule, and most churches were raised by high-ranking patrons like him. Among the monasteries that arose in the Bulgarian lands in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Bachkovo unquestionably comes first.
The typikon the founder drew up in 1083 regulates the life of the brotherhood in detail. It also mentions a monastery school: only six pupils were taught there, under the supervision of an "elder" — a title given not to the oldest monk but to the most learned.
2.The Ossuary
The monastery's most precious monument is the ossuary, which stands some 300 metres east of it. It has two storeys: the ground floor is laid out as a crypt for burials, and the church proper is above. This type of tomb-church is also found at the church of the Virgin Petrichka in the nearby Asen's Fortress and at the Boyana church, built by the sebastokrator Kaloyan as a family tomb.
The wall paintings of the ossuary are among the best preserved from the period of Byzantine rule. They stand out for the careful modelling of the human body and the elongated proportions of the figures — an example of high Byzantine art that influenced later painting in the Bulgarian lands.
3.The Portrait of Ivan Alexander
In the fourteenth century Bachkovo joined the circle of monasteries that Tsar Ivan Alexander restored, rebuilt or richly endowed — together with the Dragalevtsi monastery, "the Church" in the Ivanovo rock complex, the monasteries of Mesembria and Zograf on Athos. In the north-western niche of the narthex of the upper church of the ossuary the tsar's donor portrait is painted.
The image is one of the finest examples of the donor portraits characteristic of the Tarnovo school of painting, alongside those of the sebastokrator Kaloyan and Desislava at Boyana. In it Ivan Alexander wears the hemispherical crown that appears around the middle of the fourteenth century and is also known from the miniatures of the Manasses Chronicle and the London Gospels — adorned with four red precious stones. Some scholars read the gifts to Bachkovo, Mraka and Mesembria as part of a common policy in which culture served to strengthen the frontiers.