Boyana Church

Boyana lies at the foot of Vitosha, above Sredets. At the start of the eleventh century a fortress stood here: around 1016 a Byzantine army under Nikephoros Xiphias took the fortress of Boyana near Sofia in the last years of the war against Samuel's successors. The oldest part of the church dates from that same eleventh century — a small cross-domed church with supports built into the corners of its square nave, whose frescoes are among the few surviving from the period of Byzantine rule.

In 1259 the sebastokrator Kaloyan added a new two-storey building to the old church. The ground floor was laid out as a crypt with a barrel vault — the family tomb and at the same time a narthex to the old church — and the church proper, dedicated to St Nicholas, was on the upper floor. Boyana thus became a typical boyar family tomb-church, like the ossuary of Bachkovo Monastery and the church of the Virgin Petrichka in Asen's Fortress. Its outer walls are richly decorated with ceramic ornament.

Almost all we know of Kaloyan himself comes from the frescoes and inscriptions at Boyana. The donor inscription stresses explicitly that he belongs to the Bulgarian tsardom and names the reigning ruler. Kaloyan was a cousin of the newly elected Tsar Constantine Tikh Asen, whom he probably supported in the civil war after 1256. Whether he was the same person as Tsar Kaliman II has long been debated; Ivan Božilov rejects the identification, and with it falls the idea that Kaloyan was a son of the sebastokrator Alexander who inherited his title — Biliarski holds that he received it from Constantine Tikh, who was building a new dynastic circle around himself.

In 1259 not only the new but also the old church was painted. The Boyana frescoes are unquestionably the best preserved and most interesting of the period and the finest example of the Tarnovo school of painting. They combine the canon with individualised faces and realistic detail. Sixteen scenes tell the life of St Nicholas from childhood to death. In the arcosolium on the south wall of the narthex is the scene "Christ among the Doctors", in which the young Christ, but for his halo, could pass for a portrait of a boy. Another image shows a boy freed from Arab captivity, dressed as a child of the painter's own time.

On the north wall, beside the scene of the Presentation of the Virgin added later in the fourteenth century, are the donors — the sebastokrator Kaloyan and his wife Desislava — and nearby the couple then reigning in Tarnovo, Tsar Constantine Tikh Asen and Queen Irene. These donor and royal portraits are also the only source for the dress of Bulgarian sebastokrators.

Boyana remained a burial place of the capital's aristocracy in the fourteenth century as well. From Boyana comes the tomb inscription of the voivode Vitomir, son of Tsar Shishko, whose ring inscribed "Vitomir's ring" is also known from Sofia.