Kremikovtsi is an industrial district of Sofia

Sofia

Sofia is the capital and largest city of Bulgaria and the 12th largest city in the European Union with a population of 1.27 million people. It is located in western Bulgaria, at the foot of Mount Vitosha and approximately at the centre of the Balkan Peninsula.Prehistoric settlements were excavated...

, Bulgaria

Bulgaria

Bulgaria , officially the Republic of Bulgaria , is a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional republic in Southeast Europe. The country borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east...

. It is located to the northeast of the capital. The Kremikovtsi Steel Complex which is close to the neighbourhood is one of the largest industrial enterprises in Bulgaria and the Balkans

Balkans

The Balkans is a geopolitical and cultural region of southeastern Europe...

. More than 20,000 people used to work there but this has been reduced to 8,500 due to higher efficiency.

There has been much dispute over the future of the plant, yet no ecological sanctions have been imposed on the plant owners to bring into accord Kremikovtsi's pollution status by investing in filtering installations. Insofar, no action has been taken to either close the plant or exercise government power to control the level of harmful emissions to the air, which gave rise to concerns of corruption in the government of the Bulgarian Socialist Party's ruling coalition.

Three kilometers outside the Kremikovtsi, overlooking the village from its surrounding hills, lies the monastery of St. George the Victorious, notable for its older church's 16th century fresco

Fresco

Fresco is any of several related mural painting types, executed on plaster on walls or ceilings. The word fresco comes from the Greek word affresca which derives from the Latin word for "fresh". Frescoes first developed in the ancient world and continued to be popular through the Renaissance...

es showing patron St. George as well as other saints.

Kremikovtsi was first mentioned in 1452 and was in continuous existence throughout the 16th–19th centuries, as evidenced by written sources. Its name is derived from the initial placename *Kremikovo or *Kremik, from the dialectal word kremik ("flint

Flint

Flint is a hard, sedimentary cryptocrystalline form of the mineral quartz, categorized as a variety of chert. It occurs chiefly as nodules and masses in sedimentary rocks, such as chalks and limestones. Inside the nodule, flint is usually dark grey, black, green, white, or brown in colour, and...

", from Old Bulgarian

Old Church Slavonic

Old Church Slavonic or Old Church Slavic was the first literary Slavic language, first developed by the 9th century Byzantine Greek missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius who were credited with standardizing the language and using it for translating the Bible and other Ancient Greek...

КРЄМЪІКЪ). Previously a separate village, it was merged with Sofia in 1978.