Rock Church (Ruse ~ Bulgaria)

October 2019

The border crossing from Romania to Bulgaria was surprisingly easy as it was a case of passing passports to the mini bus driver who in turn gave it to the Romanian Border control person. They stamped it and passed it to the person sitting next to them, the Bulgarian Border control person who stamped it and gave it back to the driver.

The first big change we noticed was that we were back to the Cyrillic alphabet which isn't to bad as we now have a reasonably good handle on the phonetic pronunciations of words ie P is pronounced as an R, H is an N, N as I and so on...

Ruse itself isn't a really a tourist destination (regardless of what the Bulgarian Tourism website says) but does have a couple of sights worth checking out. The first are the remains of a major Roman fortress called Sexaginta Prista - which translates as "Harbour of sixty ships" as it was a controlling point along the Danube. Not a lot there but interesting to see the extent of Roman sites along the Danube.

A short train ride away is the town of Ivanovo outside of which is a 13th century rock hewn church. Unfortunately the description in the Lonely planet as to how to get there from town was a bit vague (i.e "it's a 30 minute walk from town") and after following the one track we could see for about 40 mins we turned back and opted to hitchhike down the 5km access road. Got lucky and had a ride down with a Bucharest tourist agent after waiting for all of 4 minutes and a railway repair worker on the way back.

We found out later that if we had persevered on the track for another 10 minutes we would have gotten there - bugger.

The church is carved out of the face of a limestone cliff about 30m above the ground and access is intentionally difficult.

Paintings in the church date back to the 1700s and are in extremely good nick - mainly because access to church is less than straightforward. 

In the surrounding cliff faces you can also evidence of caves etc being carved by priests and others - there are something like 40 other churches and 300 other chambers which date back to the 12 century.

Dining out was a small shock to the system as the first night we found out that, even though it is officially no longer allowed, smoking in restaurants is occasionally allowed - the trick will be to keep an eye out for ashtrays I think.

Seems to be quite an overlap with the food in Romania (no great surprise really) but are seeing more in the way of chips and less in the way of semolina.

Second nights meal was a major success as we went for a wander and found a really nice place. Ironically this was because the restaurant we had tried to go to a could of times we couldn't get into - waitress in charge took a dislike to us and was very less than helpful.

Anyway second nights dinner (really good) consisted of meatballs baked with tomatoes and cheese, shopski salad (think Greek salad with grated white cheese on top) and Shopski Style oven baked cheese (lump of white cheese and egg  mixture with tomato,  mushrooms, herbs and spices) all waged down with a half litre of red wine. Think white cheese is going to pay a large part of our diet over the next few weeks.