Lopushna Monastery is located at Georgi-Damyanovo, Montana, Bulgaria

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Location :

Georgi-Damyanovo, Montana

Added by Jopie, at 01 January 2020

The Lopushna Monastery of Saint John the Forerunner is a Bulgarian Orthodox monastery in northwestern Bulgaria. It lies in the Chiprovtsi part of the western Balkan Mountains, 1.5km southwest the village of Georgi Damyanovo, Montana Province.Founded in the Middle Ages but built in its present appearance throughout the 1850s, the Lopushna Monastery, and particularly its complex main church, are one of the most notable works of the Slavine Architectural School and its most prominent figure, Lilo Lazarov. It was in the construction of the monastery cathedral that Lazarov first employed vernacular Gothic decorative features, a trademark approach of the Slavine School that set it apart from other architectural schools of the Bulgarian National Revival.Geography and historyThe Lopushna Monastery is situated in the valley of the Dalgodelska Ogosta river, in the vicinity of the village of Georgi Damyanovo, formerly known as Lopushna. It lies at around 300m above sea level and can be reached through the Petrohan Pass from the capital Sofia, which is 105km to the south.The original monastery was probably established during the Second Bulgarian Empire (12th–14th centuries). The monastery had to endure torching and plundering raids in the 14th–18th centuries, the period of the early Ottoman rule of Bulgaria. In the following decades, the support of the nearby Chiprovtsi Monastery meant that the Lopushna Monastery consolidated financially. In the 1840s, Archimandrite Dionysius and the hieromonks Gerasimus and Gideon of the Chiprovtsi Monastery joined the Lopushna Monastery, Dionysius as its hegumen (abbot). Having collected funds, the clerics sought to reconstruct the ill-maintained monastery buildings.