The Church of St Sophia in Sofia

The church in this print is the one that named the city around it. Sofia took its name in the 14th century from Saint Sophia, the basilica Pitter drew here, and by 1910 the building had already lived several lives. What stands on the spot is roughly the fifth church, raised in the 6th century under the emperor Justinian. Under Ottoman rule it was turned into a mosque, its old frescoes lost and a minaret added, and then two earthquakes, in 1818 and 1858, brought that minaret down and left the place a ruin. Pitter made this aquatint in 1910, two years after Bulgaria declared itself an independent kingdom, when the ancient shell that had given the capital its name was only beginning to be pieced back together.