International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Fani Gargova
University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria; 
[e-mail]
“Bulgarian” Revival Architecture and Ethnic Exclusion
The aim of this paper is to examine the means of employing medieval Bulgarian and Byzantine 
motifs in architecture to construct a nationalistically-motivated image of Sofia as a modern European 
capital city at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. To become the 
capital of the young Balkan state of Bulgaria, Sofia underwent a complete transformation from an 
Ottoman town to a modern European city—one that is independent from Ottoman rule and rooted 
in the long Christian tradition of the grand Bulgarian kingdoms of the Middle Ages. Its urban 
development was marked by a conscious, albeit distorted, appropriation of Bulgaria’s medieval past. 
This appropriation was complicated by the paucity of surviving Bulgarian archaeological material, 
which could serve as models for the new representative buildings, and tension in the use of motifs 
connected to the great medieval enemy, Byzantium. 
The sophisticated planning and location of the modern buildings in the young capital of Bulgaria 
served the need to redefine one’s own national identity both inwards and outwards to Europe by 
aiming at projecting both worldliness and local uniqueness. This national identity was envisioned to 
be “Bulgarian” in terms of religion, language, and ethnicity. Therefore, the revival of Bulgarian and 
Byzantine motifs in Sofia’s new architecture visually and spatially helped to undermine the ethnic 

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and religious diversity of Sofia, and the Bulgarian nation as a whole. It gradually contributed to both 
the exclusion and assimilation of the specific groups of people that were legally part of the Bulgarian 
population but that did not fit the definition of Bulgaria’s new national identity. 
The main argument of this paper will be supported by the evidence of the monumental 
buildings, religious and secular, erected in the capital Sofia between 1878 and 1914 in order to 
demonstrate how the Byzantine architectural heritage was appropriated in order to create a new 
Bulgarian national style that would create ethnic exclusion in an effort of becoming “European”. 
Special attention will be paid to the tension between Christian, Jewish, and Muslim edifices on one 
hand and representative government buildings on the other.