The Church of St Petka of the Saddlers stands in the TZUM underpass in the center of Sofia, inside a semi-submerged shopping mall reached from the Serdika metro station. It is a small medieval Orthodox church with a single nave, partly dug into the ground, with a semi-cylindrical vault and a hemispherical apse. The walls are about three feet (one meter) thick and built of brick and stone. It was first mentioned in the sixteenth century, and its murals date from the fourteenth, fifteenth, seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.
It was built on the site of a Roman religious building and is dedicated to St Petka, an eleventh-century Bulgarian saint. Medieval saddlers regarded her as their patron and gave the church its name.
One theory holds that the national hero Vasil Levski is buried here. A skeleton labeled No. 95 was lost, so the theory could not be confirmed.
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