Dynastic History | Church of St Demetrius, Veliko Tarnovo — The Saint Who Was Said to Have Changed Sides

Almost everything known about what was declared here comes from a hostile witness. Niketas Choniates, a senior Byzantine official and historian, records that two brothers of the local nobility — Theodore-Peter and Asen — built a house of prayer at Tarnovo in the name of the martyr Demetrius, gathered people said to be possessed, and had them prophesy that God had decided upon the freedom of the Bulgarians and the Vlachs, and that Demetrius had abandoned Thessalonica and his shrine there to join them. Choniates was explaining a revolt against his own state, and his indignation is on the page.

The rising broke out in late 1185 or early 1186. The precise date is argued: the anniversary now kept on 26 October, St Demetrius's feast, sits awkwardly beside the brothers' documented meeting with Emperor Isaac II in that same month. Out of it came the state usually called the Second Bulgarian Empire, ruled from this town by the house the brothers founded. Choniates' phrase names Bulgarians and Vlachs together, and Bulgarian and Romanian historians have read that pairing differently ever since — an argument about modern national descent as much as about 1185.

The building is not the one he describes. Its predecessor was wrecked, probably by earthquake, in the later 13th century, rebuilt in the 1350s, plundered around 1800, and levelled by the earthquake of 1913. What stands was raised between 1977 and 1985 on the surviving footings, under the architect Teofil Teofilov. Two layers of original fresco survive inside; the excavated foundations of the monastery it once belonged to lie open in the yard.

📸 Cover: The reconstructed church of St Demetrius, completed 1985 on the medieval footings, MrPanyGoff, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons