Who ruled Sofia?

Sofia lies in a high basin in western Bulgaria at the foot of Mount Vitosha, with mineral springs rising in its centre and passes leading out in every direction. The road from Belgrade to Constantinople ran through it, as did routes from the Danube to the Aegean, so it was a natural place for a garrison and a market. Its history is long but layered: a Roman city, a medieval Bulgarian fortress, an Ottoman provincial capital, and only since 1879 the capital of modern Bulgaria.

The basin has been settled since the Neolithic. In the centuries before Rome a tribe called the Serdi, usually described as Thracian with possible Celtic links, gave their name to the town of Serdica. The Romans took the area in the first century BCE, and under Trajan the town was named Ulpia Serdica. It grew into a walled provincial capital with baths, a theatre and later an amphitheatre. The emperor Galerius issued his edict of toleration for Christians here in 311, a church council met in the city in about 343, and Constantine I stayed in Serdica often enough that he is reported to have called it "my Rome".

The Huns sacked Serdica in the 440s. Under Justinian I it was rebuilt, and the brick basilica of Saint Sophia dates from about this period. Slavic settlement followed, and in 809 the Bulgarian ruler Krum captured the town, which became known as Sredets. It returned to Byzantine rule from 1018 until the restored Bulgarian state took it back in the 1190s. By the late fourteenth century the town was increasingly called Sofia, after the old church.

Ottoman forces captured Sofia in the 1380s, and for nearly five hundred years it was an important provincial centre of the Ottoman Empire, for a long time the seat of the governor of Rumelia, the empire's European territories. Mosques, baths and markets were built, and the population came to include Muslims, Orthodox Christians, Jews (many of them Sephardim from Spain) and Armenians. Only one Ottoman mosque, the Banya Bashi, still serves as a mosque in the city.

Russian troops took Sofia in January 1878 during the Russo-Turkish War, and most of its Muslim inhabitants left. The following year it was chosen as capital of the new Principality of Bulgaria, despite being a small town of about 20,000 people at the time. Planners laid out boulevards and squares, and the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral was built in memory of the Russian soldiers who died in the war. In 1925 a bomb attack by communist militants in the Sveta Nedelya church killed about 150 people. During the Second World War Allied bombing in 1943 and 1944 damaged much of the centre; in 1943 public protests, including from church leaders, helped stop the deportation of Bulgaria's own Jews, though Sofia's Jews were expelled to provincial towns.

After the communist takeover in 1944 the city grew outwards in large housing estates and acquired Stalinist set pieces such as the former party headquarters. The regime fell in 1989, and Bulgaria joined NATO in 2004 and the European Union in 2007. Sofia today has about 1.3 million inhabitants and is the country's political, economic and university centre.