Priest Dimitar Kanchov

Dimitar Kanchov was an icon painter of the Tryavna school, the workshops in the small Bulgarian mountain town of Tryavna that supplied churches across the region through the 19th-century national revival. He had served as a parish priest before he took up the brush, which is why he is remembered as Pop, or Priest, Dimitar.

Little about his own life is firmly dated. What is recorded is the workshop around him: his sons carried on the trade, and the Kanchov family is counted among the first in Tryavna to paint secular subjects alongside church icons.