Saint Sophia in Winter

The church in this winter view is the one that gave the city its name. Saint Sofia is an Early Byzantine basilica, raised in the 6th century under the emperor Justinian on the old Roman necropolis of Serdica, and the town below it took the church's name in 1329. By 1892, when this watercolour was painted, the basilica had lived several lives. Under Ottoman rule it had served as a mosque, its medieval frescoes lost and minarets added, and it now stood at the edge of a raw new capital, Bulgaria having become a self-governing state only a decade earlier. Ewald Arndt-Ceplin, a German painter who spent his career in the Balkans and later settled in Sofia, shows it closed and quiet under snow. The work to uncover the old basilica beneath the mosque began only after 1900.