Description of the attraction
Church of Sts. Cyril and Methodius is an Orthodox church in the Bulgarian city of Veliko Tarnovo. In church documents you can find information that construction began on March 10, 1860 (the height of the struggle for the independence of the church), during the reign of Sultan Abdul-Majid I, and was completed in the fall of 1861. The author of the construction project was the renowned master, Bulgarian architect Kolu Ficheto (Nikola Ivanov Fichev). The skillfully executed iconostasis is the work of young masters Todor Nestorov (born in 1849) and Ivan Dimitrov Strelukhov (born in 1850) from the city of Kalofer. The temple was built with two domes, which fell as a result of the 1913 earthquake and have not been restored to this day.
The temple was consecrated in honor of the holy Equal-to-the-Apostles brothers Cyril (Constantine the Philosopher) and Methodius, also called the Solunsky brothers, the creators and disseminators of Slavic writing, who invented the first Slavic alphabet in the 9th century. The church is also known as the Church of St. Athanasius - this is due to the fact that the second altar of the temple bears his name. The third altar is dedicated to the holy apostles Peter and Paul.
