Five days in Sofia: a mosque, a synagogue and two cathedrals inside one square

Four nights in the capital, with a full day at Rila monastery and another out at Boyana and the mountain.

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Length
5 days, 4 nights
Where you stay
Sofia
Places
13 across 5 days
OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles Data from OpenStreetMap

Every layer of this city is still visible and most of them are within ten minutes of each other. A 4th century Roman rotunda sits in a hotel courtyard. An Ottoman mosque, a synagogue, a Catholic cathedral and an Orthodox church stand within a few hundred metres, which is why people here call that corner the square of tolerance. Nobody planned it. Underneath the main crossroads, a stretch of excavated Roman street runs between the metro exits.

Sofia is also cheap, green, and considerably more relaxed than its size suggests. The centre is flat and walkable, the metro is quick and costs almost nothing, and there is hot mineral water coming out of public taps in the middle of town that people still queue at with plastic bottles.

Four nights is the length that lets you do the two things outside the city properly. Rila monastery is a full day and worth every hour of it. Boyana church and Vitosha mountain make up another. Without those you would be looking at three days; with them, five is right.

Highlights

  • Rila monastery, striped in black and white under a wall of mountains, two hours south
  • Boyana church, whose 1259 frescoes were painting faces a century before the Italians got there
  • A Roman brick rotunda standing in the courtyard behind the presidency, and the oldest building in the city
  • Alexander Nevsky, big enough for five thousand people, built to honour Russian soldiers
  • Vitosha, a 2,290 m summit you can reach on a city bus and a chairlift

Where to stay

Sofia, four nights

Stay between the Serdika metro and the southern end of the main pedestrian boulevard. That covers the old centre, the restaurant streets and both metro lines you will actually use.

Sofia is one of the cheapest capitals in the European Union for a good room, and the difference between an ordinary hotel and a very good one here is smaller than almost anywhere else you will have booked.

Day by day

Day 1 in Sofia

The square where four religions share a crossroads

Start where Sofia is densest. Within about three hundred metres of the Serdika metro exit stand a working Ottoman mosque, a vast Sephardic synagogue, a Roman Catholic seat and an Orthodox church, and no plan put them there.

The mosque was built in the 1560s by Mimar Sinan, the architect of half of imperial Istanbul, over one of the hot springs that made people settle here in the first place. Next door, the old mineral baths building, tiled in ochre and red, is now the city museum, and the public taps outside it still run at about 40 C.

Do not overplan the first evening. The pedestrian boulevard running south from the crossroads is where the city walks before dinner.

  1. 14:00

    Banya Bashi Mosque

    Religious

    A working Ottoman mosque from the 1560s, designed by Mimar Sinan, plain outside and calm inside. Visitors are welcome outside prayer times; cover shoulders and knees and there is usually somebody to explain things.

  2. 15:00

    Sofia Synagogue

    Religious

    Moorish revival, enormous, and one of the largest synagogues in Europe, built for a Sephardic community that traces itself to the expulsion from Spain. The chandelier is the heaviest in Bulgaria.

  3. 16:00

    Sofia History Museum

    Other

    In the beautifully tiled 1913 mineral baths building, a genuinely good museum of the city itself: Roman Serdica, the Ottoman centuries, and a room on how Sofia was rebuilt after 1944.

  4. 19:30

    Dinner off Vitosha Boulevard

    Eat

    The side streets west of it have the better restaurants; the boulevard itself has the higher prices. Bulgarian food is cheap, heavy and very good.

With more time: The public taps beside the baths building run hot mineral water and people fill five litre bottles at them all day. Bring one and see what the fuss is about.

Day 2 in Sofia

A Roman rotunda, a 6th century basilica and the biggest church in the Balkans

Sofia's three most important churches are 1,500 years apart and about a kilometre from each other, which makes for an unusually satisfying morning.

The oldest went up in the 4th century, a round brick chapel in a sunken courtyard between the presidency and a hotel, with layers of fresco going back to the 900s inside it. The second gave the city its name: a 6th century basilica put up in the same wave of building as Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, later a mosque, later wrecked by earthquakes and rebuilt.

The third is the one on the postcards, finished in the early 20th century to commemorate the Russian soldiers who died freeing Bulgaria from the Ottomans. It holds five thousand people and the crypt underneath it has the best icon collection in the country.

  1. 09:30

    Church of St. George

    Religious

    A 4th century Roman brick rotunda, the oldest building in Sofia, hidden in a courtyard you reach through an archway off the main boulevard. Frescoes in several layers, some of them 10th century.

  2. 11:00

    St. Sophia Church

    Religious

    Built in the 6th century under Justinian and the reason the city is called Sofia at all. Roman tombs and mosaic floors are excavated beneath it and open to walk through.

  3. 13:00

    Lunch behind the cathedral

    Eat

    The streets east of the cathedral are full of small places serving lunch to office workers at office worker prices.

  4. 14:30

    St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral

    Religious

    The largest church in the Balkans, holding five thousand, built to honour the Russian dead of the war of 1877. Free to enter; the crypt museum of icons below charges separately and is the better half.

With more time: The flea market on the pavement outside the cathedral sells Soviet badges, cameras and hand painted icons of dubious age, and is a much better hour than it sounds.

Day 3 in Sofia

Rila monastery, and the cave the whole thing started in

This is the day Bulgaria justifies itself. Two hours south of Sofia, in a steep valley at 1,150 m, sits a monastery raised around the cell of a 10th century hermit and rebuilt in the 1830s in bands of black and white stone, with every surface of the porch painted.

It was where the Bulgarian language and liturgy survived five centuries of Ottoman rule, which is why the country treats it as more than a building. It is also spectacular in the ordinary sense: an arcaded courtyard, a striped church, and mountains straight up on all sides.

Leave early. Buses and organised trips both go, and the difference between arriving at ten and arriving at one is the difference between having the courtyard and sharing it. Go up to the hermit's cave afterwards if the weather holds; it is a 20 minute walk from the road above the monastery.

  1. 10:30

    Rila Monastery

    Religious

    Founded in the 10th century, rebuilt in the 1830s, and covered inside and out with painted saints and painted hell. Dress modestly, allow three hours, and eat the bread they bake at the gate.

  2. 14:30

    Cave of St. John of Rila

    Visit

    Where the hermit lived before any of it existed, up the valley above the monastery. Twenty minutes on foot, and there is a hole in the rock you are supposed to squeeze through.

With more time: There is a small bakery at the monastery gate selling monastery bread and mekitsi, fried dough eaten hot. It is the only food up there worth queuing for and the queue moves.

Day 4 in Sofia

Boyana church, the national collection, and up the mountain

All of today sits in the same south western corner of the city, under Vitosha, and it is the best planned day of the five.

Boyana church is tiny, and you get about ten minutes inside with a limited number of other people, because the frescoes are fragile. What you are looking at was painted in 1259: individual human faces, expressions, weight in the bodies, a hundred years before Giotto did the same thing in Italy. It is on the UNESCO list for exactly that reason.

The national history collection is a short walk away, in what was the communist government's guest residence, and the afternoon belongs to the mountain above both. Vitosha rises straight off the end of the city; a bus and a chairlift get you a long way up it, and the view back over Sofia is the one that explains the geography.

  1. 09:30

    Boyana Church

    Religious

    An 11th century church with frescoes from 1259 that are a genuine landmark in European painting. Entry is timed, groups are small, no photographs, and you will not be allowed to linger. Book ahead in summer.

  2. 11:15

    National Museum of History

    Culture

    Thracian gold, medieval manuscripts and 650,000 objects in the old communist state residence up the hill. Too big to do properly; go for the Thracian rooms and leave.

  3. 13:30

    Lunch in Boyana or Dragalevtsi

    Eat

    The villages under the mountain have taverns with gardens and grills, and they are where Sofia goes on a Sunday.

  4. 15:00

    Kopitoto

    Other

    The viewpoint on the shoulder of Vitosha, reached by bus and chairlift from the edge of the city, with the whole basin laid out below. Take a layer: it is several degrees colder up there.

With more time: If you want the actual summit at 2,290 m, it is reachable by lift and a walk in from the Aleko side of the mountain, and is a full day rather than an afternoon.

Day 5 in Sofia

Socialist Sofia, in an hour and a half

The last morning is about the period the other four days walked past. The Largo, the monumental complex at the main crossroads, was built in the 1950s as the ceremonial centre of communist Bulgaria, with the party headquarters at the top of it, and it is still the shape of the city centre.

Then twenty minutes in a reconstructed 1980s flat, which does more to explain how people actually lived than any monument does. You are allowed to touch everything, which is the point.

The metro to the airport leaves from underneath the Largo, which makes this a tidy last morning.

  1. 09:30

    Largo

    Architecture

    Three Socialist Classicism blocks around the ceremonial heart of communist Sofia, with a Roman street excavated underneath and now open as a public passage. Walk through it rather than around it.

  2. 10:45

    The Red Flat

    Visit

    A flat furnished exactly as it would have been in the 1980s, with an audio guide and permission to open every drawer. Small, funny and quietly devastating.

With more time: With more time, a yard out by the eastern metro line holds the statues taken down after 1989, Lenins and partisans lined up in the grass, with a gallery of socialist realist painting beside it.

Before you go

Getting in and getting around

Sofia airport is the busiest in Bulgaria and has cheap direct flights from most of Europe. The metro runs from Terminal 2 into the centre in about 20 minutes and is by far the easiest way in.

In town the metro, trams, trolleybuses and buses are all cheap and reasonably frequent. Day cards exist and are worth it; single tickets are still small change. Fare inspectors do check, and a ticket you have not validated counts as no ticket.

The centre is walkable end to end. Drivers do not reliably yield to pedestrians, so cross carefully, and the area immediately around the central bus and railway station is worth avoiding after dark.

Money and language

Bulgarian is written in Cyrillic and street signs in the centre are usually transliterated, but not always. Learning to read the alphabet takes about an hour on a plane and pays for itself the moment you look for a tram stop.

Cards are accepted almost everywhere in Sofia. Carry a little cash for the monastery, the village bakeries and the mountain huts.

When to go

May, June and September. Sofia sits at 550 m in a basin ringed by mountains, so it is cooler than most of the Balkans in summer and properly cold from December, with snow on Vitosha and skiing 30 minutes from the centre.

Rila is at 1,150 m and can be wet and grey when Sofia is fine. Check the forecast for the mountain rather than the city before you commit that day.

Sofia is not a city that announces itself. There is no skyline, no single view, no building everybody has seen a photograph of. What there is instead is a Roman rotunda behind the presidency, a mosque and a synagogue on the same crossroads, thirteenth century faces on a wall in Boyana, and a mountain at the end of the tram line.

Four nights, two of them spent mostly outside the city, and read the alphabet before you arrive.

Or make it a longer trip

These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

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Common questions

Is Sofia worth five days?
The city alone is worth three. The other two are Rila monastery and the Boyana and Vitosha day, both of which are among the best things in Bulgaria and neither of which can be squeezed into an afternoon. If you only have three days, cut Rila and regret it.
How do I get to Rila monastery without a tour?
There is a direct bus from Sofia in the morning that returns in the afternoon, and buses via Blagoevgrad or Rila town with a change. The direct service is the simplest but leaves you a fixed amount of time there. An organised minibus costs a little more and handles the timing, which on this particular day is not a bad trade.
Do I need to book Boyana church?
In summer, yes. Entry is timed and limited to small groups for about ten minutes, because the 13th century frescoes cannot take the humidity of a crowd. Combined tickets with the national history museum up the road are usually the best value.
Is Sofia safe?
Generally yes, including at night in the centre. The exceptions are worth knowing: the area around the central bus and railway station, the boulevard running south from it, and the city parks after dark. Ordinary caution covers the rest.