The Oldest City in Europe

I slept like a baby at Yordan’s place. We worked for hours last night and went to bed late, so when I heard him bustling around with breakfast in the morning I thought that it was too early for my taste.

Still, when I refreshed and sat down to eat, I was miraculously woken up. We had Pogacha with Kaymak, which would be some pastry and some dairy cream, with some sweet tea. It was a rather humble and very simple breakfast, but really tasty. After this we had a cup of black coffee and Yordan told me about his plan of action.

He wanted to take me to see one of the oldest cities in the World — Plovdiv. It is also the second largest city in the country and one of the main tourist attractions. An interesting fact is that there is an asteroid named after Plovdiv, more precisely Asteroid 3860 Plovdiv.

We took the highway; Yordan had to use his offline GPS to find the right exit, but in a little less than 2 hours we arrived to the site. We first stopped in the city to buy some snacks to eat along the way, and then we headed to the old city and historic sites.

I learned that the city is so old that the earliest evidence of the settlement date in the 6th millennium BC! That’s really old… The city itself is situated on Maritsa River and on 7 syenite hills, which is why it is often referred to as the City of Seven Hills. Also, because of its antiquity and significance, it is also called the Eternal City of Bulgaria.

The city features really a great number of historic sites, yet the most impressive was definitely the Roman theatre. It is said that it dates since the 2nd century and that it was build during the Emperor Trajan. It is impossible to imagine how huge it is; I supposed that it could accommodate a ton of people, but Yordan was more precise — 7K people could easily fit into the theatre! That’s really something.

Next we saw the Roman stadium — built in the 2nd century BC, during Emperor Hadrian. An interesting fact is that this Roman stadium was built similarly to the stadium in Delphi. It accommodates almost 30K people! Today you can easily imagine how huge it was, but only a small part of it has been preserved. Apparently a huge part of the stadium lies beneath the city streets, which is really a shame.

My advice for anyone visiting this ancient city is to easy allocate at least a whole day for browsing and sightseeing various locations. We actually planned to head to the Bachkovo Monastery which is only about 10–20 minutes away from Plovdiv, but found that it was already too late to go anywhere else except home. It was already 8 o’clock when we finally looked at our watches and we had to leave the rest of this excursion for another day.