Karlukovo

🌿 The healing stillness, and the hospital that grew from it

Few people know that Karlukovo keeps a tradition of a particular, invisible energy. At the old Karlukovo monastery of Viktorova Laka, and in the caves around it, century after century people came looking for healing of the body and of the spirit.

📜 The tale of the mind restored

Local accounts tell of a hermit — an old churchman — who long ago sheltered in one of the rock niches. To him they brought a gravely ill man whose reason had darkened and whose soul was troubled, a man everyone else had given up on. With sincere prayer, with silence, and with immersion in the strange, quieting energy of that rock place, the old man is said to have brought the sufferer's mind back to him.

Word of the healing place passed from mouth to mouth across the centuries. In the early twentieth century, in 1902, the state psychiatric hospital was built on the foundations of the old monastery. To this day it is held that the quiet of the canyon, the old forest and the harmony of the place work on the human mind like a balm.

⛪ The rock chapels — faith cut into stone

High in the crags that lean over the Iskar are the medieval rock churches of the hesychasts — monks who sought complete silence and union with God.

👁️ Prohodna cave, the Eyes of God — a great natural tunnel whose roof carries two vast openings looking straight up at the sky. Their symmetry quiets everybody who stands beneath them.

⛪ The rock monastery of St Marina — reached by a narrow, exhilarating path glued to the cliff. The fourteenth-century chapel stands in an unreachable niche above the river, and those who get inside still feel the stillness that the wall paintings and centuries of prayer have kept.

☦️ The rock church of St Nicholas, called Gligora — a secretive place holding fragments of old painting, where faith outlasted the hardness of the stone.

🏛️ The monastery church of the Dormition of the Mother of God — hidden in the park of the hospital grounds, this sixteenth-century stone church, half sunk into the earth, is a cultural monument of national significance: the last survivor of the great monastic house that once stood here.