Imagine that we’re standing now at the  highest point of Sofia… plain – 550 m. above the sea level. At the same time it’s  the highest check mark of the town’s  history-  the Christian Orthodox temple which  gave its name to the city of  Sofia is situated here.  This place was beyond the fortress walls of then roman city called  Serdica  by  the name of its first inhabitants – the Celtic  tribe of Serdi . The site was a part of a large roman theater in the 2-nd century- and that’s where the story of this emblematic church begins.  On the place where the first martyrs for Christianity were tortured and perished a small cemetery church  appeared somewhere between the 2-nd and the 3-d century AD to carry the light of the Holy Wisdom through the centuries.

There are a lot of churches  named after the Divine Wisdom  - Sofia  in Greek , but probably only one city in the world, that  took the name of its main temple - the name of God’s wisdom – it’s Bulgarian capital Sofia.

Declared capital of Bulgaria in 1879 after the liberation of 5-centuries of Ottoman rule, Sofia expanded more than 10 times since  and is presently  a city with 1,2 million inhabitants, bearing all the signs of the quick growth – European architecture from the end of the 19th and the beginning of 20th century and vast panel residential complexes from the communist era. But the “hearth” of this “Ever Growing, Never Aging ” city, as the motto on its coat of arms says, never stopped beating here in its central part, around the st. Sofia church and the hot mineral springs. The center of one of the oldest European cities has  never changed its place during the last 20 centuries. That’s why the walk tour of Sofia center in 3-4 hours would take you through  ages of remarkable history of Europe, Byzantium and Bulgaria and show to you the monuments of so much different epochs in one and the same place. So, welcome to the walking tour of Sofia.