Sredets

In the 14th century Sredets was a town of scribes and churchmen, ringed by fourteen monasteries, where merchants from Dubrovnik kept houses and potters made bright glazed wares. In 1382 or 1385 the Ottoman commander Lala Şahin Pasha took it after a three-month siege, and the monasteries around it were later laid waste.

The Ottomans made the city, now called Sofia, the seat of the beylerbey of Rumelia, who governed all their lands in Europe. Its Christians paid dearly for one moment of hope: when János Hunyadi's crusaders reached Sofia in 1443, the townspeople welcomed them with a Mass in the church of Saint Sofia, and when the army withdrew a few weeks later they were massacred for it. Sofia grew instead into a Muslim city, its great churches turned into mosques and new ones raised by Sinan, and by the 16th century its covered market was the largest in the Balkans.