Bachkovo Monastery, Plovdiv

Gregory Pakourianos, a Georgian military commander of the Byzantine Empire, founded the monastery in 1083. The Eleusa icon of the Virgin Mary arrived from Georgia in 1310 and became the center of an enduring Marian devotion. The monastery survived Ottoman devastation, served as a guardian of Bulgarian culture, and was artistically renewed during the Bulgarian National Revival.

Gregory Pakourianos held the title Grand Domestic of the Byzantine western armies. He was Georgian by birth, a soldier by profession, and a man of deep Orthodox faith. In 1083, he chose a site in the Rhodope Mountains along the Chepelare River and established a monastery with a Typikon written in both Georgian and Greek. The document reveals a mind that was both practical and devout: it governed everything from property management to the rhythm of daily prayer.

Pakourianos endowed the monastery with vast estates to ensure its survival. He could not have known that survival would be tested across nearly a millennium of political upheaval, foreign domination, and fire. Yet the community he planted took root. When the Eleusa icon arrived from Georgia in 1310, the monastery acquired its spiritual center, an object of devotion that would draw pilgrims for the next seven centuries and counting.