Antiquity and Middle Ages

Ruins of the 15th-century Roman Catholic Cathedral of Saint Mary

It is known that the area around Chiprovtsi has been inhabited since the time of the Thracians and later the Roman Empire, when the local metal deposits were exploited.^[1] According to historian V. Velkov, the valley of the Ogosta was inhabited by Thracians since the early 1st millennium BC. According to ancient accounts, the area was populated by the Thracian tribe of the Triballi or a related group of Thracians. The Romans conquered what is today the Bulgarian northwest after 29 BC and consolidated their authority in the region under Emperor Trajan (98–117). There are remains of Roman fortifications around Chiprovtsi, such as the Latin Fortress ruins in the Kula area, where coins dating to the reigns of Marcus Aurelius (161–180) and Commodus (180–192) have been unearthed, and the Big Ruins south of the town. The gold, silver, lead, copper and iron mines brought sizable revenue to the Romans, who took good care to protect these from barbarian attacks.^[15]

With the arrival of the Seven Slavic tribes and the Bulgars in the 6th–7th century and the establishment of the First Bulgarian Empire in 680 in the former lands of the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine Empire), the entire region was soon incorporated into the Bulgarian realm. After a period of renewed Byzantine rule in 1018–1185, it was part of the Second Bulgarian Empire until its conquest by the Ottomans in the late 14th or early 15th century.^[15]

The presence of the German ore miners, known locally as sasi (саси, Saxons), cannot be accurately dated. Some researchers estimate their arrival in Chiprovtsi to be in the mid-14th century, the time of the last Bulgarian emperors, while others claim they reached the town during the early Ottoman rule of Bulgaria. Their exact number and place of origin are also vague, although the German miners were widely recruited as specialists in medieval Wallachia, Transylvania and Serbia. In Chiprovtsi, they are thought to have arrived as a single group of about 50–60 people with their families. They were probably recruited through special contracts and likely received some privileges compared to the native Bulgarian population. In Chiprovtsi's mines, they served as technicians and overseers, contributing to the technological progress of mining in the region.^[15] They were, however, gradually assimilated by the local Bulgarians by the mid-15th century, as indicated by German names with Slavic suffixes in the population registers. The Germans left behind the name of one of the neighbourhoods, still known as the "Saxon" neighbourhood in the 17th century, and Roman Catholicism as the dominant religion in the town.^[16]

In the second half of the 14th century, a certain number of Bosnian Croats and Ragusan merchants arrived in Chiprovtsi and its surroundings, accompanied by some Franciscan clerics from Catholic Franciscan province of Silver Bosnia. According to the research of Croatian historian Vitomir Belaj, the Catholic Franciscans had arrived from medieval Bosnia in western Bulgaria at the time of Bosnian vicar Bartul Alvernski ("Bartholomew of Alverno"), who himself originated from Italy, in 1366. Among the newcoming settlers there were some noblemen as well. According to Belaj, these included members of the Parchevich family, the ancestral house of the Peyachevich family.^[17]

Early Ottoman rule

As the Ottomans subjugated the Balkans in the 14th–15th centuries, they valued the Chiprovtsi mines for their military and civil needs and sought to renew the ore extraction that had been interrupted by warfare. Renewed exploitation of the local deposits is thought to have commenced by the late 15th century;^[18] a note of 1479 mentions that the mines "in Bosnia, Herzegovina and other places" had been rented.^[19]

The town of Chiprovtsi and several of the surrounding villages were administratively organized as a hass, or a private possession of the sultan's royal family and later of the sultan's mother. The special status of the area meant that the local Christians would not be subject to the usual discriminatory laws, but would have to pay an annual tribute of silver to the sultan. Later on, the estate was organized as a waqf, a land devoted for Muslim religious or charitable purposes. Chiprovtsi and the region were inhabited exclusively by Christians and they had the privilege to perform their rituals in public without discrimination. The only Turkish person in the town was the sultan's representative and no Turks were allowed to settle there, as the local Bulgarians enjoyed self-government to a certain degree and were administered by an elected council of eminent Bulgarian residents (knezove). A fragment of the area's pre-Ottoman Bulgarian administrative division may have also been preserved, as it is referred to under the Slavic name voivodeship in some documents.^[20]

By the 1520s, Chiprovtsi was still a minor centre of mining activity compared to other places in the empire. In that period, it brought a revenue of 47,553 akçe, as compared to Kratovo's 100,000 and Srebrenica's 477,000. The Catholic miners are known to have arrived by that time, as the Catholic Church of Saint Mary had been built around 1487, but it was not until the years after the 1520s that Chiprovtsi attracted more colonists and turned into one of the Ottoman Empire's leading mining centres. By 1528, Chiprovtsi had a mint and was manufacturing silver coins. In 1585, the miners were forced to work night and day and had to pay increased taxes, leading to protests and the danger that they may migrate. By the time, Chiprovtsi was already providing a revenue of 1,400,000 akçe, making it one of the empire's prime mining and metalworking regions.^[22]

In the mid-16th century, Chiprovtsi began to attract the attention of Catholic officials from Rome. In 1565, the archbishop of Antivari (today Bar, Montenegro) Ambrosius arrived in the town as an apostolic visitor. In 1592–1595, the Bosnian Croat cleric Peter Solinat and a group of Franciscans established a Catholic mission in the town. In 1601, Solinat was appointed bishop of Sofia with his seat in Chiprovtsi by Pope Clement VIII. He chose to reside in Chiprovtsi because Sofia's Catholic population was limited to a handful of Ragusan merchant families.^[23]

Cultural heyday

Chiprovtsi's development reached its apogee in the 17th century, when it became a bustling cultural, religious and merchant centre of that part of the Balkans. Named the "flower of Bulgaria" in that period,^[24] some have deemed the town's prosperity the Balkans' only participation in the Renaissance, along with that of Dalmatia.^[25] Many members of the local élite were educated in Rome, particularly at the Collegio Clementino and the Sapienza University.^[26] Gradually, the foreign Franciscans were replaced by locals and in the 1620s the Bulgarian Catholics formed a separate autonomous entity directly subordinate to the Pope, the Bulgarian Custody. Solinat was succeeded by a Bulgarian bishop, Iliya Marinov of Chiprovtsi, who was in turn followed by another local, Petar Bogdan Bakshev,^[27] who travelled to Wallachia, Warsaw, Vienna, Rome and Ancona looking for funds and support for the community. In the 1640s, the Bulgarian Custody gave way to the Diocese of Marcianopolis presided by Petar Parchevich and the Diocese of Nicopoli headed by Filip Stanislavov and represented in Chiprovtsi by Franchesko Soymirovich.^[26] The town and the surrounding areas were not entirely Catholic: a significant part of the population was Orthodox; the Orthodox Chiprovtsi Monastery still exists today.^[28]

The evolution of Chiprovtsi from a mining town to a trade hub owes much to the settlement of merchants from the Republic of Ragusa (today Dubrovnik, Croatia) and the quality of the local metalworking, as well as the lack of permanent Ottoman presence and the privileges enjoyed by the population. By the mid-17th century, mining was in decline, as the silver deposits had been all but exhausted (in 1666 there remained only 16 iron smelteries),^[23] forcing the population to seek a more profitable occupation. Since 1659, the Ragusan merchants from Provadiya altered their traditional route to Dubrovnik through Sofia in order to visit Chiprovtsi. The local residents produced and traded with leather, carpets, fabrics, clothes, remarkable gold and silver jewellery, metal tools, cattle, etc. Initially, the Chiprovtsi merchants would only visit Vidin, Pirot, Sofia and Vratsa. Later, however, they appeared at the markets in Istanbul, Thessaloniki, Bucharest, Odessa, Braşov, Sibiu, Belgrade, Buda and Pest, with a particularly strong presence in Wallachia and Transylvania, where they established permanent agencies and sizable companies in Târgoviște, Câmpulung and Râmnic during the rule of Matei Basarab (1632–1654). The international trade broadened the outlook of the locals and introduced the ideas of the age and the European culture of the time to the region.^[19]

A Catholic monastery was built during the time of Peter Solinat and developed as an educational centre through its school; it was referred to as one of the most prestigious schools in the Bulgarian lands in that period. The school was partially foreign-funded and provided education in grammar, arithmetic, logic and philosophy^[29] to 75–80 students. The teachers were often Bulgarian graduates of the Collegio Clementino in Rome and the languages of education were Latin, Bulgarian and "Illyrian", a Croatian form written usually in the Latin alphabet but sometimes in Cyrillic. The school also had a library, one of the first in Bulgaria. Since the 1630s, the eminent writers and translators from Chiprovtsi, most notably Petar Bogdan Bakshev and Petar Parchevich, formed the so-called "Chiprovtsi Literary School", issuing books about the history of Bulgaria, as well as on religious topics.^[28]

Chiprovtsi Uprising

A work of the Chiprovtsi goldsmithing school (17th century), National Historical Museum of Bulgaria

As prosperous as the region was, it was not unharmed by the constant Ottoman–Habsburg wars and was often the target of Turkish, Tatar and Hungarian rebel raids. By the 1630s, the idea of an organized anti-Ottoman revolt had reached the town of Chiprovtsi. In his 1650 account to the senate of the Republic of Venice Petar Parchevich described the long preparations for an armed struggle and the support-seeking visits of his fellow townsmen to the kings of Poland and Austria. Since then, the inhabitants of Chiprovtsi waited for the suitable moment when they would be able to instigate an effective uprising and continued to co-operate with the leaders of the European realms.^[30]

On 12 September 1683, the Ottomans were routed by the forces of Europe at the Battle of Vienna. In early 1684, Austria, Poland and Venice concluded an anti-Ottoman pact; they were joined by Russia in 1686 to form the Holy League. It was clear at that time that the decisive moment was near. The leaders of Chiprovtsi assessed that after the imminent capture of Belgrade by the League in 1688 their European allies would reach Sofia and end the Ottoman rule of Bulgaria. Thus, they revolted in the spring of 1688.^[30] The reach of the uprising cannot be exactly determined, but scholars such as S. Damyanov believe it included Chiprovtsi and the neighbouring Kopilovtsi, Klisura and Zhelezna and thousands of Bulgarians from the entire Bulgarian northwest. Although the leaders were mostly Catholics, the bulk of the insurgents were Orthodox. It is known that the rebellion was led by over 200 voivodes of separate detachments.^[31] The insurgents were aided by six regiments of regular Habsburg army and artillery under General Heißler and managed to briefly capture the town of Kutlovitsa (modern Montana), but were ultimately crushed by the Ottomans and their Hungarian ally Imre Thököly.^[32] On 18–19 October, the Ottomans stormed Chiprovtsi and retook it from the rebels, capturing over 2,000 people. About 3,000 natives of the area, guarded by the remaining insurrectionary units, managed to flee beyond the Danube.^[33] Most of those settled in the Habsburg-ruled realms, founding a major Bulgarian colony in the Banat known as the "Banat Bulgarians", as well as colonies in Deva and Alvinc (Vinţu de Jos) in Transylvania^[34] and Szentendre in modern Hungary.^[35] The town itself was plundered, burned down and deserted and its links to the West were largely severed.^[33]

Repopulation and modern times

For several decades after the uprising, Chiprovtsi and the region remained desolate. In 1699, the Ottomans attempted to settle 1,238 anti-Habsburg Hungarian rebels in those lands and provided them with 5-year tax exemptions, but this proved unsuccessful as in 1717 the same Hungarians were moved to the Rousse barracks and sent to fight at Niš.^[36]

Ultimately, the region was repopulated by Orthodox Bulgarians, beginning in the 1720s. In 1737–1738, the sultan amnestied the rebels and permitted the return of the insurgents' property in 1741,^[37] though none of the former residents is known to have returned. In the 1720s–1730s, Chiprovtsi had only 12 inhabited houses; by the 1750s, those had reached 150.^[38] The Orthodox Chiprovtsi Monastery had been reestablished in 1703 by a certain Zhivko who took the ecclesiastical name of Zoticus.^[39] As the interrupted mining was apparently not continued after the uprising and the international trade links had been severed, the locals switched to cattle breeding, agriculture, fur trade and later carpet weaving as their main occupation.^[40]

The western traveller Ami Boué, who visited the town in 1836–1838, reported that "mainly young girls, under shelters or in corridors, engage in carpet weaving. They earn only five francs a month and the payment was even lower before". By 1868, the annual production of carpets in Chiprovtsi had surpassed 14,000 square metres.^[41] Following the Russo-Turkish War in 1877–1878, Chiprovtsi, along with all of northern Bulgaria and the region around Sofia, became part of the newly liberated Principality of Bulgaria, the predecessor of modern Bulgaria. In 1896, almost 1,400 women from Chiprovtsi and the region were engaged in carpet weaving. In 1920, the locals founded the Manual Labour carpet-weaving cooperative society, the first of its kind in the country.^[42]

Chiprovtsi Bulgaria Street Map

In the 1950s, ore output was renewed in the region, briefly revitalizing Chiprovtsi through the influx of young and highly educated people. On 12 September 1968, Chiprovtsi was officially proclaimed a town by the National Assembly of Bulgaria.^[40] In Socialist times, the town had a factory that produced AK-47 magazines and employed about 400 people.^[43] After the democratic changes in 1989, mining was discontinued again due to a lack of funds, the factory was closed and the carpet industry has been in decline as it had lost its firm foreign markets. As a result, the town and the municipality have been experiencing a demographic crisis.^[40]