The Old St. Petka Church in Sofia

This is a small church that kept going. The Old Saint Petka, dated by an inscription to the 1240s, sits low on Tsar Kaloyan Street, its floor sunk below the modern pavement where centuries of Sofia have piled up around it. The word old in its name marks it off from another Saint Petka nearby. Where the great basilica of Saint Sophia across town spent the Ottoman centuries turned into a mosque, this little single-nave building simply went on as an Orthodox church. A German traveller noted it still standing in 1578, and it was standing when Pitter drew it in 1912, among his last Sofia plates before he returned home to Bohemia.