Sofia; Saturday, 21 October, 2023

I had an early start to get breakfast and be out of the hotel just after 8 to make it up to the cathedral for 8:45 and the start of my day tour out into the Bulgarian countryside. Thankfully I was awake a few minutes before my alarm went off, and at that time on a Saturday morning the breakfast room was pretty well deserted so I was able to have a relaxed breakfast and still make the metro over to the cathedral.

The tour I was booked on was a day trip out to the Rila Monastery, the largest monastery in the country and one of the largest orthodox monasteries in the world. The tour also included a stop at the Bonaya Church on the way back.

There were multiple buses at the meeting point all offering different versions of the tour – some including a lunch stop, at the expense of losing time at the monastery, some only going to the monastery, some only going to the church. Even within the tour groups there were multiple options with some people – like me – opting for a fully guided tour in English, whilst others had opted for a downloadable audio guide and some had just paid for the transport and no guide. Consequently there was quite a bit of confusion and it wasn’t until 9:15 that we finally set off – given that the tour company run the tour every day it’s quite a surprise how disorganised bits of it were!

We started off with a two hour drive out of the city and into the Rila Mountains, the highest mountain range in the Balkans. The last 50 minutes of the journey was a quite slow 31Km drive up into the mountains to the monastery at the meeting point of two rivers high in the mountains.

The guide gave us a 45 minute tour round the main parts of the complex, including inside the church – where photography was banned, before giving us just over an hour to explore by ourselves – including the opportunity to climb up the Defensive Tower, built in 1335 and the oldest surviving part of the complex.

After our allotted two hours in Rila we all piled back onto the coach and headed back into Sofia, diverting via the ring road to the southern suburb of Bonaya to visit the church there. Bonaya used to be a separate village and even then, as it is to today, it was home to some of the wealthier citizens of Sofia, who consequently had the money to richly decorate the church with frescos that still survive to today (in part by keeping the numbers allowed in to visit to small numbers and not allowing any photography or bags inside the main part of the church.

We had about a 30 minute stop here to take in the frescos and have a wander around the site before it was time to get back on the bus and head back into Sofia to be dropped off back at the Cathedral. From there I hopped back on the metro over to my hotel to freshen-up before heading back out a little later for dinner.

When I’d visited in 2019 and met up with a colleague who was running the city’s marathon on that occasion, we’d visited a Bulgarian Restaurant which I remember as having had excellent food, so thanks to the creepy prowess of Google for tracking my past movements I was able to identify the restaurant and head there for dinner.

Once again I wasn’t disappointed with the meal, and very stuffed I meandered back to the metro via a couple of nighttime photos in Serdica before heading back to the hotel for a night cap and then bed.