“St. St. Peter and Paul” Monastery

In the northern part of Arbanassi plateau, only 6 km from Veliko Tarnovo, is located Monastery “St. St. Peter and Paul ”or also known as Lyaskovets Monastery, as it is located 2km south of the town of Lyaskovets.

The monastery was built in the years of Second Bulgarian State by the brothers kings Assen and Peter. There is a Legend – during the organization of the uprising for the Liberation of Bulgaria from Byzantine slavery 1185, the Asenevtsi brothers made a vow, if the uprising was successful, to build a monastery above Lyaskovets.

With the advent of the Ottoman army in the Bulgarian lands near Tarnovgrad, Monastery “St. St. Peter and Paul was repeatedly destroyed, burned and rebuilt with the help of the local Bulgarian population.

In the 1960s, the monastery came under the complete rule of the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople, and Bulgarian monks and abbots were expelled. Greeks were housed in their place, but they were expelled in 1870, when the Bulgarian Orthodox Church was declared independent.

Lyaskovets Monastery “St. St. Peter and Paul ”was a center for organizing many National Liberation movements, such as Marino Uprising, Hadjistavrev Rebellion and the detachment of Captain Grandfather Nikola Filipovski.

The monastery has maintained constant contact with Russian Orthodox monasteries, and evidence of these warm relations is the gospel donated by Russian Tsar Peter I with gilded covers in 1708, which is preserved to this day in the Church Historical and Archaeological Museum in Sofia.

The Peter and Paul Monastery (as it is also known among the local population) has gone through many and varied functions during its long existence. It was a theological school (1874), a seminary (until 1885), an orphanage (1878), a shelter for the mentally ill (from 1902 to 1912).

From 1947 to the present day the monastery “St. St. Peter and Paul ”is a functioning Bulgarian Orthodox nunnery, part of the Veliko Tarnovo diocese.

Book early your stay just 6 km from the Lyaskovets meadows in house museum Chamurkov guest house near Veliko Tarnovo.

Open here directions from our house to St. St. Peter and Paul Monastery