St John of Rila and the Monastery of German

By 1870 the town of Samokov, in the mountains south of Sofia, had become one of the great workshops of the Bulgarian revival, turning out painted icons, carved screens, and printed images. This woodcut belongs to that last, cheapest kind. It shows Saint John of Rila, the tenth-century hermit who founded Rila monastery and is honoured as the patron saint of Bulgaria, set beside the German monastery near Sofia, which also keeps his memory. A woodcut could be pulled many times and sold for little, so an image that once meant a pilgrimage to a remote mountain could now hang in an ordinary home. Bulgaria was still under Ottoman rule when this was cut, eight years before the country won its independence.