by Dimana Trankova; photography by Anthony Georgieff

"Elenska bazilika. Nacionalen pametnik na kulturata IV vek." In a few centuries, historians will claim that the stone inscription inlaid in the brick surface of the restored wall around the Elenska Basilica is the first written example of the newest Bulgarian alphabet. Known as shlyokavitsa or metodievitsa, it uses Roman instead of Bulgarian characters and is used mainly to write SMS text messages and sometimes emails.

But this is in the future. For now, the church, probably one of the best-known unknown landmarks in Bulgaria (it is a UNESCO protected site, but hardly anyone has heard of it), remains among the oldest in the country.

Four miles east of Pirdop, at the foot of the central Balkan Mountains, the basilica glows red in the centre of a green meadow. 

Under Communism, Pirdop, together with nearby Zlatitsa, became the centre of the copper mining industry and the excavations inevitably left their mark on the area. There is no sign of industry near the Elenska Basilica, however. The grass is rank. If you see anyone in the vicinity, they will probably be a villager from the nearby village of Anton, tilling their scrap of land.

When the brick walls of the three-apse basilica appeared is a matter of contention. Some believe that the church was built in the 4th Century, immediately after the Christian religion was legitimised by Emperor Constantine the Great. Most people think, however, that the basilica was erected at the end of the 5th or the beginning of the 6th Century, shortly before the rule of another emperor also dubbed "great," Justinian I.

Whenever the basilica may have been built, it soon needed to be defended. The invasion from the east by the "barbarians," as the Byzantines called them, affected this part of the Balkans too. A high protective wall was raised around the church to provide a measure of security for the monks who had settled beside the basilica, and for the inhabitants of the small Thracian village nearby.

The walls withstood several assaults. In fact, the reputation of the Sveti Iliya, or St Elijah Monastery was such that it was one of the first stops made by Patriarch Evtimiy on his journey into exile. He had organised the defence of Tarnovo when the Ottomans besieged it and had to leave the city when it fell in 1393. Over the next three centuries the monks of St Elijah became famous as guardians of Bulgarian culture, because of their industrious work in the local scriptorium.

In 1700 St Elijah Monastery attracted some unwelcome attention. The exact circumstances remain unclear, but it is known that Ottoman Yahiya Pasha ordered his troops to bombard the monastery and the basilica. Since that time, the specialists from the National Institute for Monuments of Culture, who restored the ruins, have been the only people to build there.

They did a good job. The protective wall is so well reconstructed that you can walk along almost the entire length. The only problem is the vigourous stinging nettles, which cluster around it with the first warm months of the year.

The vaults of the basilica, at nearly 9 m, or 30 ft high, appear to resemble other similar structures but, in fact, archaeologists do not know of another such building that had its cupola added later. The origin of the name of the basilica is another puzzle.  It helps to speak some Bulgarian to understand this. The root of the word "Elenska" can be found either in elen, or deer, or in Elena. Many an unwary traveller, misled by this similarity, has headed for the town of Elena, on the northern slopes of the Balkan Mountains.

It would be a cliché to say that the versions of why the local people decided to give this name to their basilica could have been invented by Dan Brown, but like most other clichés, it is true.

The most popular theory is that of a well-known professor specialising in Thracian culture. He claims that the Thracians living in this part of the Sub-Balkan Valleys worshipped the male deer. Regarded as a symbol of the sun and male fertility, the animal was the object of a mystic ritual. The Thracians gathered in the meadow where the basilica now stands and, in what was a classic example of sympathetic magic – please reread your Frazer – they sacrificed a buck.

It seems the Bulgarians, who came much later, preserved the Thracian veneration for the deer as a sacred animal. A number of folk songs refer to the newborn Jesus as a deer.