Gastro tour “Chiprovtsi! All Inclusive”

We arrive in Chiprovtsi at 10.00 am and visit the local History Museum. It was founded in 1988 in connection with the national celebrations of the 300th anniversary of the outbreak of the Chiprovtsi uprising. The first hall is dedicated to mining; separate stages of mining and ore processing are presented with an emphasis on the new technologies brought by the Saxon miners. In the second hall are shown works of the Chiprovtsi goldsmith school (XVI-XVII century) and their distribution on a European scale.

The third hall presents the place and role of Catholicism in the life of the people of Chiprovtsi in the 17th century – educational activities, diplomatic and missionary activity of the local Catholic clergy, outbreak and course of the Chiprovtsi uprising and subsequent migration movements in today’s Romanian and Croatian lands. The fourth hall traces the main periods in the development of the Chiprovtsi carpet. And in the fifth is a church painting.

We join a workshop for weaving Chiprovtsi carpets, which since 2014 are on the list of the intangible cultural heritage of UNESCO. The beautiful fabrics were once made only in Chiprovtsi but spread throughout the Ottoman Empire. Currently, a square meter of the famous Chiprovtsi carpets is estimated at about BGN 250-300, but the older ones are significantly more expensive.

In the afternoon we join a workshop for dyeing wool with natural dyes, which are contained in the roots, bark, wood, leaves, fruits, and flowers of various plants. Many of them are distinguished by their exceptional durability to the action of sunlight and to washing. Birch leaves, cones, red beets, onions, maple, wild apples, etc. are used for different colors.

If you have not tried Chiprovtsi fried meat, slaughterhouse, hazelnut, oppressed peppers, Torlak pie with roasted obgi crusts, and fried troy, you will enjoy them during lunch and dinner on the first day.

In the morning after breakfast, we go with a mountain guide to the Chiprovtsi waterfall. The transition is about 4 km in one direction and 3 km back. We reach an extremely beautiful, 18-meter waterfall about a kilometer and a half from the border with neighboring Serbia. The altitude is about 1200 meters. Lunch is a picnic on the meadows around the destroyed Gushovski Monastery “St. Archangel Michael”.

Little remains of the walls of the former church, but to this day the history, memory, and respect for this place are preserved. As well as the legend of the “goose” deer, passed down from generation to generation. Once on the temple holiday of the monastery, he himself came to the slaughter of a deer with a white spot on his neck – “goose”.

People waited for him to rest and drink water and sacrificed him. One year the deer was late and they did not wait for it to drink water, they slaughtered it immediately. Since then, the goose has never appeared on the holiday again. The monastery was burned down during the Chiprovtsi uprising in 1688. From here the retreating rebels gave the last resistance to the persecuting hordes.

In the afternoon we will have the opportunity to buy fresh and canned farm products, honey, jam, sausages, cheese, and canned vegetables from the farmers’ market specially organized for the participants in the tour. We continue with a beer tour with kraft beer, prepared by the youngest brewer in Bulgaria – 19-year-old Tsvetomir Stefanov. Live “Chiprovtsi beer” is brewed from malt, hops, yeast, and water using the classic technology described in the German Beer Purity Act of 1516.

The tour ends with a visit to the Chiprovtsi Monastery, built by Bulgarian Catholics in the 10th century. In 1404. after the uprising of Constantine and Fruzhin the holy monastery was destroyed for the first time. The second attack on the monastery after the suppression of the Chiprovtsi uprising of 1688 had particularly severe consequences. Then the rich monastery library containing valuable Slavic books and icons was destroyed. The Bulgarian Catholic population was forced to emigrate and the monastery was deserted.

At the beginning of the 18th century, Orthodox monks settled in the Chiprovtsi Monastery and rebuilt it. In 1800, the Russian Emperor Paul I presented the monastery with a silver gospel, which is now stored in the National History Museum. During the uprisings in northwestern Bulgaria, the Chiprovtsi Monastery housed several thousand rebels. The monks themselves joined as rebels in the Lom conspiracy of 1867-68. In July 1876. near the monastery, battles were fought by the detachments of Panayot Hitov and Filip Totyu.