Dynastic History | The Round Church, Preslav — Named From a Note in a Margin

A council at Preslav in 893, on the account the site's museum gives, moved the Bulgarian capital from Pliska, put Simeon on the throne, and made Bulgarian the language of worship and of administration. The Round Church went up in the decades after that, outside the inner city where the palace stood, on a terrace some 250 metres beyond the south gate.

Its other name comes from a note in a margin. Tudor Doxov, copying an Old Bulgarian translation of Athanasius, wrote that the work was done at Simeon's order in the year 6415 of the Byzantine reckoning, which is 907, "where the same prince had the holy new golden church built". Whether that church is this one has never been settled: Stancho Vaklinov called the identification incontestable, Nikola Mavrodinov thought it probable, A. P. Vlasto thought it not certain. The naos is a rotunda of 10.5 metres divided by twelve niches, finished in marble, glass mosaic and painted ceramic. Scratched into the walls are saints' names in Greek, and letters and short texts in Glagolitic and in Cyrillic, the two alphabets in use at once.

The ruins were opened in 1927 by Yordan Gospodinov, working for the National Archaeological Museum and the Bulgarian Antiquities Society, and the whole of medieval Preslav was put under state protection as a reserve in the same year; the church was listed as a monument of national importance in 1970. Krastyu Miyatev's later campaign did the fuller study. The pale upper walls a visitor photographs today are twentieth-century restoration, sitting on older stone.

📸 Cover: The Round Church seen from the atrium, its pale upper walls modern restoration, Klearchos Kapoutsis, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons