Църквите по Шуменското плато (ІV – ХV век)
Churches on the Shumen Plateau (4th–15th Centuries)

Summary/Abstract: The earliest Christian churches on the Shumen Plateau are registered in the Shumen Fortress and date to the Roman-Byzantine period (fourth to sixth centuries). The next stage in church construction on the Shumen Plateau from the ninth to the 15th century is associated both with the Christianisation of Bulgaria and the establishment of the new faith (the second half of the ninth to the early 10th century) and with the formation of a monastic colony in the monasteries on the slopes of the Shumen Plateau after the 10th–11th centuries. The study sequentially examines the churches from the initial stage of the emergence of the monastic community on the Shumen Plateau – the churches of the so-called “cult centre” in the Shumen Fortress, the basilica (church No. 10) beneath the southern tower of the fortress wall, the church “Sv. Bogoroditsa” on the southeastern slope below the Shumen Fortress, the church at the monastery “Sv. Troitsa” in the Troishki boaz, the burial church near the village of Novosel. With the transformation of the Shumen Fortress into one of the most important urban centres of the Second Bulgarian Kingdom (12th–14th centuries), the monastic community on the plateau expanded. It is during this period that the overall construction of a specific structural model can be observed, in which a particular church around the Shumen Fortress or at the foothills of the Shumen Plateau functioned as a main church (or as a catholicon of a monastery), with rock monasteries from the adjacent Boazes becoming affiliated with it.

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