EXPLORATIONS NEAR CHIPROVTSI (Ivan Sotirov, Angel Angelov – ichidzen@yahoo.com) The church had a single-nave, a single-apse with a barrel-vaulted ceiling and a narthex. The nave measured 7.80 m by 3.65 m and its walls were 0.90 – 1 m wide, constructed of ashlars bonded with mortar and with wooden beams incorporated into the structure. Two pairs of arcosolia, 1.70 m wide and 30 cm deep, divided by two pilasters, 50 cm wide, were situated on the northern and the southern walls of the nave. A window was later opened in the eastern arcosolium of the northern wall. There were two niches, 60cm wide and 30 cm deep, from both sides of the entrance on the western wall of the nave. Tempera wall-paintings were preserved in both arcosolia on the southern wall and on the western façade of the nave. The legs and the weapons of two military saints, probably St. George and St. Demetrius, or St. Theodore of Amasea and St. Theodore Stratelates, were documented in the western arcosolium. Fragments of wall-paintings were discovered in the debris inside the nave. The second construction period was related to the building of a narthex, constructed of roughly-cut stones bonded with mortar, 6.50 m long and 4.10 m wide. There were stone benches along the northern and the southern walls of the narthex and the entrance was from the west. Two burial chambers, containing the skeletons of four men, were discovered in the narthex. Burials Nos. 2 and 4 were secondary and the skeletons were intact. There were traces of gold-lace from clothes fastened with a silver button on the right shoulder. A gilded silver pendant and a rosary with bone beads were found in burial No. 2 and a silver finger-ring with semiprecious stone was discovered in burial No. 4. The grave goods dated to the 16th – 17th centuries. The bones of the skeletons from the earlier burials were collected and placed aside from the coffins of burials Nos. 2 and 4. A burial of a child was explored close to the north of the church. It contained a silver coin of the Bulgarian King Ivan Alexander (1331 – 1371) and his son Michael Asen. The church was built in the 14th century. The narthex was additionally constructed during the second half of the 16th – beginning of the 17th century. The church was probably abandoned after the Chiprovtsi Uprising in 1688 organized by the Catholic Bulgarians.