Aladzha Monastery is a medieval Orthodox Christian cave monastery complex in northeastern Bulgaria, 17 km north of central Varna and 3 km west of Golden Sands beach resort, in a protected forest area adjacent to the Golden Sands Nature Park. Aladzha Monastery is the most famous medieval rock monastery on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast, inhabited by hermit monks in the 13th - 14th centuries. The beginning of systematic studies of this Christian monument was set at the end of the 19th century by the founders of Bulgarian archeology - brothers Karel and Hermin Shkorpil. In 1927, Aladzha Monastery was declared a "national antiquities", and in 1968 - an architectural cultural monument of national importance. There is no information about when the monastery was founded. The surviving frescoes in the chapel testify that there was a rich spiritual life here during the Second Bulgarian Kingdom (13th-14th centuries). After the fall of Bulgaria under Ottoman slavery at the end of the 14th century, the Aladzha monastery gradually declined and was probably finally abandoned by the end of the 15th or the beginning of the 16th century.
