Dynastic History | Holy Forty Martyrs Church, Veliko Tarnovo — The Column That Lists the Conquests

Ivan Asen II had this church built after a battle fought on 9 March 1230, the feast of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste, which supplied the dedication. Inside he set up a marble column carrying thirteen lines in Bulgarian recording the victory and what came of it. That text is the court writing about the court — the nearest thing the dynasty left to a signed statement of its own case, and it should be read as one.

He put it in company. Two older inscribed columns stand nearby, both in Greek and both from the First Bulgarian Empire: one of Khan Omurtag, whose text describes a palace built on the Danube at a site still unidentified, and a boundary marker from the reign of Krum, reused upside down. Hauling those stones into a new royal church made a claim about inheritance that no chronicle had to spell out.

The rest is the ordinary history of this town. The church kept Christian use well into the Ottoman centuries and was later converted to a mosque, its paintings and iconostasis destroyed and its structure altered; published accounts disagree on when that happened, giving dates from the 15th century to the 1850s. The earthquake of 1913 left it badly damaged. In the 1970s a grave was found here with a gold signet ring reading "Kaloyan's ring", and the remains were later reburied with state ceremony as those of Tsar Kaloyan. The identification is disputed — historians have objected to an error in the ring's inscription and to its form, which they date after Kaloyan's death — and published accounts differ even on the year of the excavation. The church reopened to visitors in the mid-2000s.

📸 Cover: The column of Ivan Asen II inside the church, Svik, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons