Asen's Fortress

A stronghold on a rocky spur above the gorge of the Chepelarska River, three kilometres from Asenovgrad on the road into the Rhodopes. The place has been inhabited since Thracian times, the fortress was built by the Byzantines, and its present appearance was given to it in 1231 by the Bulgarian tsar Ivan Asen II, as an inscription carved into the rock by the entrance records. The walls ran along the edge of the precipice, and the only approach was from one side, along a narrow ridge. Of the fortress itself, fragments of walls and towers remain, but the Church of the Holy Mother of God of Petrich has survived almost in full: a two-storey church with a bell tower, a type rare in the Balkans, in which the lower level served as a crypt and the upper one as the church proper. Fourteenth-century frescoes survive inside. The church stands on the very edge of the cliff and, seen from the road below, reads as a continuation of the rock face. The climb from the car park takes about ten minutes up a stairway.

Address

86, Asenovgrad

On the map