Cultural and Historical Heritage: Preservation, Presentation, Digitalization (ISSN: 2367-8038)
Volume 4, Issue 2, 2018

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Title: Pilgrimage of Believers with Special Needs at the Heart of Holly Mountain of Sofia City – Study and Paradoxes of a Mission Almost Imposible Today
Authors: Mariyana Shabarkova-Petrova, Liana Galabova

Abstract: Resent requirement of elementary accessibility of church monuments at the historical centre of Sofia city for visitors, dwellers, servants, pilgrims, and tourists with difficulties is still a social challenge providing experts and responsible institutions with opportunities to seek new decisions. Actual inaccessibility of temple spaces to believers with disabilities, difficulties, special needs, and unequal social status limits spiritual messages and pastoral care that is to be directed to the expectations, rights, and attitudes of local members of the prevailing traditional denomination, but also to all tourists from the country and abroad. Complex access to sacral spaces is considered all over the world to be natural part of religious attitude to pilgrimage; still the concern facilitating visitors of any kind to sacred places as much as to tourist sites, remains equally irrevocable part of spirituality and civility.

Keywords: Management of Tourist Sites, Pilgrimage Safety, Integrated Religious Tourism, Eastern Orthodox Christian Church Monuments, Human Rights of Disabled, Disadvantaged, People with Special Needs and Difficulties, Church Management

Received: 01-10-2018     Accepted: 01-12-2018     Published: 01-12-2018

Citation: Shabarkova-Petrova, M., Galabova, L. (2018). Pilgrimage of Believers with Special Needs at the Heart of Holly Mountain of Sofia City – Study and Paradoxes of a Mission Almost Imposible Today. Cultural and Historical Heritage: Preservation, Presentation, Digitalization (KIN Journal), 4(2), ISSN 2367-8038, Institute of Mathematics and Informatics – Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 229–269