History of Sofia
Sofia has a history that goes back thousands of years. Through the centuries, many peoples have inhabited it and added to its rich and diverse history. Numerous Neolithic villages have been discovered in the area, while a chalocolithic settlement has been recently discovered in the very center of modern Sofia.
The Thracian Serdi tribe settled here in the 7th century BC and gave the first recorded name of Sofia -- Serdica. The Byzantines called it Triaditsa and the Slavs - Sredets. The modern city of Sofia was named in the 14th century after the basilica St. Sofia. In Greek, word sofia means wisdom. In the 3rd century AD, the Romans built strong walls around Serdica, their capital of Inner Dacia and an important stopping point on the Roman road from Naisus (present Nish, Yugoslavia) to Constantinople.
During the 1st-4th century A.D. Serdika was a flourishing Roman city, the capital of the Inner Thracia region. Following the religious reforms of Constantine the Great, Serdika became the seat of a bishop. By that time the city boasted a major Christian church, St. Sofia, where in 343 A.D. the crucially important Serdika Ecumenical Council was held. It confirmed the rejection of the Aryan heresy at the First Council of Nicaea (325) and reaffirmed, following turbulent debates, the Nicene creed, which to this day forms the basis of affirmation of faith in all versions of Christianity.
The visitor can still visit some of the places where the Council took place, such as the St. Sofia church, next to Parliament, and the St. George’s Rotunda, currently in the courtyard of the Sheraton Hotel. Sections of the Serdika fortress wall can be seen in several parts of the city. The pedestrian subway crossing, which links the President with the Council of Ministers, features the East Gate of the fortress. Pedestrians walk on the very flagstones which were part, some 1,400 years ago, of the main city thoroughfare. Less than a kilometre to the north-west, near the Halite shopping centre, parts of the North Gate have been uncovered, insribed with praises to the Emperors Marcus Aurelius and Commodus. Currently, work is under way to uncover for visitors more of the old fortress at the Serdika metro station.
During the great migrations of the 5th and 6th centuries, Serdika was frequently sacked by Huns, Goths and other barbarians. From mid-6th century onward, under Justinian the Great the city, re-named into Triaditsa, recovered its status of regional capital of the Eastern Roman Empire.
In 809 the Bulgars, who had swept in from the shores of the Caspian sea to establish a state to the north of the Balkan mountains, added the city to their land, re-naming it into the Slavic “Sredets”. It was later, as the rest of Bulgaria, re-absorbed into the Byzantine Empire, but recovered its independence and re-joined the resurgent Bulgarian state following a series of uprising in the 10th century.
Between the 14th century and the late 1870s the city, as the rest of the nation, was part of the Ottoman Empire. It was re-named “Sofia”, after its oldest church, sometime in the 15th century. By 1440 Sofia was again a major regonal Imperial centre, administratively in charge of 25 provinces. The Ottomans built on the foundations they found in place, re-establishing with lavish scale the Roman baths in the centre and re-structuring a number of churches (not, however, St. Sofia itself) into mosques.
Whilst Sofia is the capital - it is not architecturally as rich and beautiful as its other Eastern European counterparts; Prague or Budapest for example. However there is still plenty to see and do in Sofia (Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Boyana Church and National History Museum) and much is being done to improve the current tourist attractions. What makes Sofia special is its close proximity to Vitosha Mountain, and other world famous places of interest such as Rila Monastery and Koprivshtitsa are also a day trip from the Capital.
