Rakovski (town)

Rakovski (Bulgarian: Раковски [rɐˈkɔfski]) is a town in southern Bulgaria, in the historical region of Thrace. It is located in the Plovdiv Province. The town is also the centre of the Rakovski Municipality. Rakovski was founded in 1966 with the merging of three villages — General Nikolaevo, Sekirovo, and Parchevich. The new town was named after the prominent Bulgarian revolutionary Georgi Sava Rakovski.

The town is located in the western part of the Upper Thracian Lowland, at 25 km to the northeast of Bulgaria's second largest city Plovdiv, and has an area of 5,50 km². Rakovski is located in a transitional continental climatic zone south of Stara Planina. The summers are hot and dry and the winters are mild, with snow remaining for about a month.

Traces of human population in the area date back since the Chalcolithic. There are remains of an ancient settlement and a Roman road at 2 km to the southeast of the town.

The area was settled by Paulicians in the Middle Ages, who served as frontier guards and heavily armed infantry in the battles between the Byzantine Empire and Bulgaria between the 9th and the 14th century. Most of them fled to Nikopol on the Danube, the Second Bulgarian Empire's last stronghold, after fierce fights with the Ottomans in the end of the 14th century. There they accepted Roman Catholicism from Chiprovtsi missionaries and gradually returned to their native places. The different confession did not, however, affect the local residents' patriotic feelings, as many took part in the Bulgarian National Revival.

Information about the three villages (now neighborhoods) that formed the town of Rakovski in 1966 can be found in several Ottoman tax registers. General Nikolaevo is mentioned as Kalıçla sarı and Sarı Kalıçla in 1488 and 1576, Sekirovo is denoted as Baltacilar in 1576 and Parchevich is counted under the name Ali Fakıh.

Rakovski is by far the largest predominantly Roman Catholic town in Bulgaria, with the vast majority of the population professing Roman Catholicism. There are Roman Catholic churches in all three neighborhoods, those in General Nikolaevo (built 1929) and Sekirovo serving as parish churches and being known as two of the largest Roman Catholic places of worship in this largely Eastern Orthodox part of the Balkans. Rakovski is part of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Sofia and Plovdiv.

A nunnery and a monastery are located in the town, the former being a Franciscan one dedicated to the Sacred Heart and the latter to Polish martyr Maximilian Kolbe.

The Catholic Church of the 'Sacred Heart' in Rakovski is the largest in the Balkans. It was built in 1928 after the Chirpan earthquake that left it in ruins.