Rila Monastery – significant part of Bulgarian wealth

The Rila Monastery is one of my favorite places in Bulgaria and I visit it at least once in a year or two. As soon as you enter, you feel the antiquity and sanctity of this place– in the course of a millennium it was built, ravaged, robbed, repeatedly burned to the ground and sprout up againlike a phoenix from under the hands of people with indomitable spirit such as the architect Alexi Riletz. It has not only spiritual and cultural value but has also given shelter to national heroes and symbols such as Vasil Levski, Peyo Iavorov, Gotse Delchev and Ilyo Voyvoda, so there are reasons to respect this placeevenif you are not Christian or religious at all.
Every timeI go there I am overwhelmed by calmness and security, not only because of the longevity and spirituality of the place, but because of the fresh air, the height(it is located in the Rila mountain), the peaceful life of its permanent inhabitants (the monastery has the status of a village). I can not define myself as an Orthodox Christian - in my daily life I'm more like a rational atheist, but when I stand in the courtyard of the Rila Monastery, I feel that "grace" that clergyman talk about, and it is incomparable to anything else.
One of the things I do not like about the Rila Monastery in the recent years however, is the commercialization. Someone is trying to make as much money from the cloister, listed in UNESCO and the “100 tourism sites of Bulgaria”. I think we – the people who honor and respect the place, its history and the ones who gave the irlives for it, must do two things to break this trend: 1. To convince today's managers of the monastery that this is not correct and 2. To start to maintain the monastery in the way it has been maintained through the centuries - with our own efforts and resources. Every time I go, I make a donation - sometimes I give more, sometimes less, but I am always trying to contribute in some way. Many people follow my example–a simple Google search returns the names of Violeta and Zdravka Georgieva, who donated ethnographic values, Svetlio Kantardzhiev who made a monetary donation, Raiffeisen Bank, which funded an eco-trail to the monastery, and there are certainly many others. I encourage you if you value this place, to help banish or at least reduce "the merchants in the temple", because our ancestors have not built it with their blood for this purpose.