Zemen Monastery

The Zemen Monastery (Bulgarian: , Zemenski manastir) is a Bulgarian Orthodox monastery located one kilometre away from Zemen in western Bulgaria.

The monastery was established in the 11th century. It is rather small with a church, belfry and two other buildings. It is currently uninhabited. The church is a monument of culture. The church dates from the foundation of the monastery in the late 11th century and has a cube shape, 9 metres long, 8 metres wide, 11.20 metres high. The material used was travertine. The altar is a stone monolith and the floor is made of colourful tiles. The church is richly painted inside, with two layers of frescoes, the scarcely preserved early one dating to the 11th century. The better preserved Biblical scenes date from the mid-14th century and include several portraits of donors: the first one depicting an unnamed man, his wife Doya and their two children, the second featuring a young man, Vitomir, and a boy, Stoyu. These portraits rank among the oldest and artistically most valuable in the Balkans after the frescoes of the Boyana Church. wiki

The Boyana Church (Bulgarian: , Boyanska tsarkva) is a medieval Bulgarian Orthodox church situated on the outskirts of Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, in the Boyana quarter. The east wing of the two-storey church was originally constructed in the late 10th or early 11th century, then the central wing was added in

the 13th century under the Second Bulgarian Empire, the whole building being finished with a further expansion to the west in the middle of the 19th century. The church owes its world fame mainly to its frescoes from 1259. They form a second layer over the paintings from earlier centuries and represent one of the most complete and well-preserved monuments of Eastern European mediaeval art. A total of 89 scenes with 240 human images are depicted on the walls of the church. The name of the painter is recently discovered during restoration. The inscription reads: "zograph Vassilii from the village Subonosha, Sersko and his apprentice Dimitar". National History Museum director Bozhidar Dimitrov stated: "The renovation revealed a rare inscription under a layer of plaster on one of the church walls: 'I, Vasiliy' inscribed. We now know the painter with certainty. The 13th-century 'Boyana master' was the only painter among the kings and nobles whose names were read out on a regular basis during sermons at the church."[1] Restorator Grigoriy Grigorov stated the reason: "The Christian Orthodox religion forbids the painter from manifesting himself, as in the eyes of the priests it is God who guides his hand. But this painter inscribed his name, knowing that the believers could not see it."[2] 18 scenes in the narthex depict the life of Saint Nicholas. The painter here drew certain aspects of contemporary lifestyle. In The Miracle at Sea, the ship and the sailors' hats recall the Venetian fleet. The portraits of the patrons of the church Sebastocrator Kaloyan and his wife Desislava, as well as those of Bulgarian tsar Constantine Tikh and Tsaritsa Irina, are thought to be among the most impressive and lifelike frescoes in the church, and are located on the north wall of the church. Besides the first layer of 11th-12th century frescoes, of which only fragments are preserved, and the famous second layer of murals from 1259, the church also has a smaller number of later frescoes from the 14th and 16th-17th century, as well as from 1882. The monument was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1979. The frescoes were restored and cleaned in 1912-1915 by an Austrian and a Bulgarian specialist, as well in 1934 and 1944. The church was closed for the public in 1977 in order to be conserved and restored and once again opened in 2000.