The Madara Rid­er, rep­re­sent­ing the fig­ure of a knight tri­umph­ing over a lion, is carved into a 100-m-high cliff near the vil­lage of Madara in north-east Bul­gar­ia. Madara was the prin­ci­pal sacred place of the First Bul­gar­i­an Empire before Bulgaria’s con­ver­sion to Chris­tian­i­ty in the 9th cen­tu­ry. The inscrip­tions beside the sculp­ture tell of events that occurred between AD 705 and 801.