By the late 9th and the beginning of the 10th century, Bulgaria extended to Epirus and Thessaly in the south, Bosnia in the west and controlled the whole of present-day Romania and eastern Hungary to the north. A Serbian state came into existence as a dependency of the Bulgarian Empire.

Under Tsar Simeon I (Simeon the Great)

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, who was educated in Constantinople, Bulgaria became again a serious threat to the Byzantine Empire. Simeon hoped to take Constantinople and make himself Emperor of both Bulgarians and Greeks, and fought a series of wars with the Byzantines through his long reign (893-927). The war boundary towards the end of his rule reached Peloponnese in the south. Simeon proclaimed himself “Tsar (Caesar) of the Bulgarians and the Greeks,” a title which was recognised by the Pope, but not of course by the Byzantine Emperor.

The peak in the Bulgarian cultural and political development in the Middle Ages was the 10th century, named the Golden Age of Bulgaria.

The adoption of Christianity as a state religion in 865 gave new scope to monastery building. The excavations in the old Bulgarian capitals of Pliska and Preslav are a convincing proof of the fact that it was in the monastery complexes that the new Christian culture in Bulgaria came into being. From the very beginning the monastic community was called upon to fight for the establishment of a coherent ethnic structure by joining the Proto-Bulgarian and Slav population to common rites and religious traditions thus creating and developing an all-Bulgarian culture.

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The Lion in Winter rip Dog Day Afternoon hd After the adoption of Christianity in the second half of the 9th century the monasteries built near Pliska and Preslav and bearing similarities to the Byzantine ones, carried out, apart from their church-and-ritual functions broad cultural, educational and economic activities. There appeared art studios for ceramic icons, scriptorium in which liturgical books were translated into Slavonic, new literary works were created, literary miscellanies were compiled which satisfied the necessity of propagating and consolidating the new religion. At that time the monasteries near Preslav gave shelter to such prominent men of letters as Konstantin of Preslav, Chernorizets Hrabr and Exarch Yosif who created works of extreme cultural and historical value thus marking the so-called Golden Age of Bulgarian literature.

However, the monasteries were not only literary, cultural and artistic centres. A large-scale construction was carried out there and in their environs. The ceramic, glass and sculptural workshops set up during the First Bulgarian Kingdom (9th-lOth c.) were~ the monastery complexes. At that time the architecture of Central and Western Europe was quite austere and dull while in the Byzantine Empire they were mostly interested in the architecture of inner spaces. In contrast to it Bulgarian architecture created dynamic silhouettes, broken – up colorful facades decorated with plastics. Despite the monastic asceticism the monastery buildings beam with their marvellous architecture – flexible and multicolored, an apotheosis of the organic merger and interaction of pagan traditions and achievements of the Christian culture. Later on, in the l0th-11th century, this pictorial style was adopted by Byzantine architecture and the architectural practices in Russia, Serbia and other Orthodox states.

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