 At the turn of the 20th century, the Church of the Holy Mother of God was the terminus of two rival religious processions organised by the ethnic Greek and Bulgarian communities of Asenovgrad. A Greek procession took place in 1899 and a comparable Bulgarian one was carried out several years later. These processions began after a man claimed to have seen lights and heard chants while passing near the then-abandoned church. Both processions ended with a Divine Liturgy observed at night by the church.
