The Seven Thrones Monastery (Sedemte prestola)

The Osenovlag Monastery "Holy Virgin Mary", better known as Sedemte prestola (The Seven Thrones), is located at the foot of Izdremets Peak in the beautiful valley of the Gabrovnitsa River, a right tributary of the Iskar River. The road to the monastery passes through the Iskar Gorge. The monastery church "Pokrov Bogorodichen" is a cultural monument of national importance. The monastery probably dates back to the 10th century. According to legend, its establishment is associated with the Bulgarian boyar Petar Delyan, leader of the Bulgarian uprising against Byzantium in 1040-1041. It is even claimed that he was buried together with his brothers in the monastery. This is very unlikely, because the uprising began in the current lands of Serbia and grew mainly to the southeast. It reached the Sofia region, but not the lands of the Gorge. And after the uprising ended, the blinded Petar Delyan was taken to Constantinople.

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  It is not known what the fate of the monastery was in the years surrounding the conquest of Bulgaria by the Turks. Written records have been preserved about the existence of the monastery at the beginning of the 16th and in the 17th centuries. The monastery was repeatedly devastated. Its destruction in 1737 was particularly severe, but after that it was rebuilt by the Bulgarian population. In 1770, another devastation followed, and its last restoration was in 1815, when the present monastery church was built.
  In addition to historical data, there is a separate legend about the creation of the monastery. According to it, the Seven Thrones was founded (rather rebuilt) by 7 boyars (or 7 brothers according to an alternative version of the legend), hence the name of the Monastery. It is believed that the 7 boyars came from Bessarabia and settled in the Balkans with their families. Their settlement in these lands is also connected with the emergence of 7 villages near the monastery – Osenovlag, Ogoya, Ogradishte, Bukovets, Leskov Dol, Zhelen and Lakatnik.
  In the 16th century, active spiritual and literary and educational activity developed in the Osenovlag monastery. From that time, a four-evangelion is known, written or used in the monastery. Other liturgical books were also used - the four-evangelion from 1551, a service book from 1554, a printed edition by Bozhidar Vukovich from Venice, etc. Sophrony Vrachanski resided in the monastery. In the monastery school, opened in 1849, many children from the surrounding villages were taught to read and write. With these activities, the monastery kept the self-awareness of the enslaved Bulgarian population in the region awake. The monastery during the era of the national liberation movement was more than once a refuge for revolutionaries, including the apostle of freedom Vasil Levski.
  Like most Bulgarian monasteries, the Seven Thrones is surrounded by a high stone wall, and the church is located in the middle of the inner courtyard. The complex also includes a bell tower and two residential wings. The bell tower has three bells, one of which is from 1799. According to legend, the material for the monastery's bell was taken from the gate of the fortress, which was located opposite the monastery.
  The most extensive construction in the monastery was in the 19th century. During a renovation in 1868, the exonarthex (the open vestibule) was added to the church, whose white arcade adds color to the monastery courtyard. On old foundations, north of the church, in 1877 local craftsmen erected a four-story building, the second floor of which has housed the primary monastery school of Hieromonk Christopher since 1849. The monastic cells are arranged in the upper two floors around spacious verandas. Religious and everyday scenes were painted on the facade of this building, facing the courtyard. The second building, above the entrance to the monastery courtyard, built a year later, was the monastery guesthouse. The spacious guest rooms were reached through a system of picturesque verandas stacked on top of each other. This building, in terms of its architectonics, is one of the best achievements of our monastery construction.
  The church in the "Seven Thrones" monastery has been repeatedly remodeled and expanded. The simple facade design with blind smooth walls, varied only by later windows and narrow openings - spiers, the heavy and roughly executed cornice and the low dome bears the characteristics of church design from a more recent time (Ottoman period). But behind the clumsy silhouette lies an original plan of a medieval multi-throne temple. This is a type of cross-domed building. The arms of the cross are elongated, especially those along the longitudinal axis. Above the square at the intersection of the central nave and the transept (transverse nave), an octagonal drum with eight small windows rises on pendentives, which carries the dome. The arms of the cross are covered with gable roofs that rest on the drum. Initially, the roof of the church was with stone slabs, which were replaced with tiles during renovation in the 20th century. The four rooms between the cross shoulders are differentiated – chapels with small apses from the east. They are accessible from the nave and are covered with cylindrical vaults. In a later period, a vestibule (narthex) was added to the church. It also had two separate side chapels with a passage between them. Then, an exonarthex (canopy) with an arcade was added in front of the entrance. The chapels and the western wall of the nave were painted, but now the mural paintings are only partially preserved - on the pendentives, the dome and in some of the niches of the chapels. The scheme of a multi-throne monastery temple is an architectural type that came to the Balkan Peninsula in the 10th - 11th centuries from the Caucasus. Such churches were rarely built in Bulgarian lands. This happened only during the 11th - 12th centuries, when certain Armenian-Georgian forms penetrated Bulgarian architecture through Byzantium. So probably there’s a grain of truth in the legends about the emergence of the temple around the 10th-11th centuries.
  The frescoes in the church were painted by an unknown artist in the traditions of late medieval Bulgarian art. The carved iconostases of the church and chapels, which date from the 17th - 18th centuries, although executed in archaic technique, combined plant ornamentation with images of animals and even biblical stories. The large collection of icons with carved frames show stylistically that they came from the hand of the last masters of the local late medieval icon painting tradition, such as priest Nikola from Teteven, teacher Urosh and Stoyu from Troyan. The large wooden chandelier "Horo", composed of fifteen parts with colored woodcarving scenes, is the most interesting carving work in the monastery. It dates from 1815 and is the last manifestation of the master carvers and icon painters from the western Stara Planina region.