The Church St. Sofia

When Nikola Petrov painted this in 1909, Sofia was a young capital, barely 30 years out of Ottoman rule, and the plain brick church in front of him was one of the oldest things in it. St. Sofia goes back to the 6th century, raised under the emperor Justinian over earlier churches and the necropolis of Roman Serdica, the town that stood here first. For about three centuries under the Ottomans it served as a mosque, until 19th-century earthquakes toppled a minaret and left it empty. After Bulgaria's liberation it returned to Christian use. It even gave the city its name: sometime in the 14th century the town stopped being called Serdica and took the name of its church, Sofia, holy wisdom. Petrov paints it heavy and unadorned against the sky, the Roman graves still lying under its floor.