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- 11/11/2023 17:33
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St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral is one of Bulgaria's representative buildings and is a Bulgarian Orthodox cathedral located in the center of Sofia.
As a result of continuous wars with the Turkic (Ottoman Turks) since the 16th century, the Russian Emperor Alexander II finally defeated the power of the Ottoman Turk Empire in the Eastern War in 1877-1878. As a result, Bulgaria, which had been under colonial rule for 500 years since the 14th century, was liberated along with other Balkan Peninsula countries. Accordingly, the Bulgarian people raised Russian contributions and built a large church building to represent the Eastern Orthodox religion, and named the temple after the Russian saint “Alexander Nevsky.”
In 1882, the achitecture project was commissioned to Russian architects Bogomoloff and later to Pomerantseff, and construction began in 1904 and was completed in 1912. When facing the cathedral church, its height is 72 meters and its width is 55 meters, and it is said to be the largest temple of this architectural kind. The inner area is 3,170 square meters and the space volume is about 86,000 cubic meters, which can accommodate up to 5,000 people. The outer wall of the dome was plated with gold donated by Russia to make it visible from afar, and the bell tower also has 12 bells provided by Russia so that the sound of the bells could be heard from afar. The interior space is all-in-one, but the walls are filled with icons, making it look like it has four floors.
The interior of the cathedral is a unified space, but is structured as if it is divided into four floors. The interior decoration and floors are made of marble from various countries, and the walls are decorated with mosaics and frescoes. Inside the building, a crypt was discovered that was intended to be a royal tomb and is currently being used to store icons and frescoes. Parts of it were damaged when the British and Americans bombed Sofia during World War II, but were later fully restored. It was declared a national cultural heritage site in 1955 and is currently one of Bulgaria's top 100 tourist attractions.
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