This is my story about my visit to historical Sofia.
Our next destination was to be The National Library, but on the way we also passed a few more interesting buildings and statues. One of these was the National Gallery for Foreign Art, also a Vasil Levski Monument (he is a key figure in Bulgarian history-he is still well respected throughout the Bulgarian community)
The above picture is of the Bulgarian National Library, it is a nice building to take a look at, we decided not to go in as we most likely wouldn't understand most of the books :) The men in the middle are the founders of the library!
Sofia Art Gallery
This is a picture of the outside of the Sofia art gallery, it is a snail which we understand was made by a Bulgarian, so we took a picture of it! At the moment The Sofia art gallery is hosting Japenese art, but it is ever changing.
On the way to the gallery we passed The National Museum Of Natural History. This is a three storey building which hosts over 1 million specimens of animals, minerals and vegetables. On the top floor it also has small live animals, such as snakes, mice and turtles.
Next to that is the Ethnographical Museum, this is a large yellow building. Inside there is a series of displays about Bulgarian crafts over the last 300 years.
The Golden Lady
This is the statue of the Golden Lady. Sofia's motto is "ever growing, never ageing"!
Aleksander Nevski Church
This is the first place that we visited on our tour. As you can see from the picture, this is a very impressive building. Looking up at the church the first thing that I saw was the large golden domes on the top, they are laden with 8kg of gold leaf! Inside you are not allowed to take photos, but it is absolutely beautiful. There are stained glass windows, delightful murals and very elaborate thrones. This church was built in memory to the 200,000 soldiers who died fighting for Bulgaria's independence!
St. Nikolai Russian Church
On the way to this church we took a stroll through the park, there was a man playing an accordion and it was a really nice day to see the sights!
Again, we passed a few more places of interest on our way to the Russian church. The first thing we saw was Sofia University, then as we crossed throught the park we came face to face with a large statue (pictured below), which we translated to mean, "Monument to The Liberators", built in 1907. It is fairly impressive and we took some photos of it too. Across from the staue is The National Assembly which was established in 1884.
After this we saw St. Nikolai's Church which is similar to Aleksander Nevski but on a smaller scale.
