The road to Malko Tărnovo is a long one, whichever route you take. My own journey there was by way of an early morning minibus from the port of Burgas on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast. Less than 24 hours earlier, I had been in Dimitrovgrad in south-east Serbia catching a train over the border to Sofia, from where I would connect with an overnight service to take me on to the coast. As we waited on the train at the Bulgarian customs post for the border officials to work their way along the carriages, the sun broke out unexpectedly from behind banked clouds to fill the compartment with warm golden light, an event that prompted a nightingale in the bushes outside to suddenly burst into joyful song. Birds are indifferent to political frontiers; customs officials less so.
I wake at dawn just before we reach Burgas. There is a hint of coal gas in the air: the chimneys of the port’s industrial outskirts are already billowing yellow smoke into the sky as striated clouds glow pink against the blue. Walking out of the handsome neoclassical station, I find the city just starting to stir into life as early-shift trams glide along almost empty streets. In the small park next to the station, another nightingale sings from its hidden perch as screaming swifts swoop for flies overhead.
Ancient Thrace
The minibus to Malko Tărnovo skirts the bay and is soon passing through rolling wooded countryside interspersed with a few scattered villages. This south-eastern corner of the country constitutes a region known as the Strandzha (sometimes spelled ‘Strandja’) — a tucked-away area of modern-day Bulgaria that was once home to powerful Thracian kings. The kingdom of Thrace, as was often the way in the ancient world, did not correspond to modern political boundaries but spanned what are now three distinct countries — Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece. These days, because of its biodiversity (the Strandzha was never glaciated and so has unique Tertiary-period flora), the same region is a designated national park: Strandzha Nature Park (or ‘Priroden park Strandzha’), the largest protected area in Bulgaria.
Arriving in Malko Tărnovo, half of the passengers decant immediately into a café that seems to double as a community centre. I join them for a coffee before heading off in search of my rented apartment, which turns out to be on the top floor of a four-storey Communistera block — about as elevated as it gets in this low-rise backwater.
A small, fairly remote mining town, Malko Tărnovo has never been much of a tourist centre, and until relatively recently foreign visitors were positively discouraged from visiting due to the town’s proximity to the Turkish border. As a result, accommodation options are limited.
The town centre is moderately attractive in a typically Balkan sort of way: a cobbled square with a handful of municipal buildings, a leafy park with benches and statues of local worthies, a whitewashed church with an Orthodox-style cupola atop a modest bell tower, a kiosk selling snacks and newspapers. For reasons unknown — a festival perhaps — the square is also home to a plywood row of dancers in traditional costume, holes cutout for children’s faces to peer through.
In need of a leg stretch after a short nap on the sofa, I set off in search of the Thracian domed tombs that I am informed lie in woodland just a few kilometres away. At the highway at the edge of town, a bold road sign offers a binary choice of destinations: ‘Istanbul’ in one direction and ‘Burgas’ in the other. A short way in the direction of Turkey, another sign, ‘Propada’ (Пропада), points along a concrete track that leads through a rolling landscape of pasture and hay meadows.
I follow this and, reaching a river, I am directed uphill along a footpath that winds through the dappled light of mixed woodland — hornbeam, beech, oak and a few gnarled walnut trees. The tombs are easy to spot, half-submerged in leaf litter, coated in moss and pocked with lichen; some are little more than fragments while others are more or less complete. The whole sprawling necropolis has something of the atmosphere of a sacred grove, an impression enhanced by the call of a distant cuckoo and occasional nervous outbursts from a somewhat reticent nightingale. Sacred grove was, perhaps, the original intention of its creators — numinous, mysterious, a place to wander (and wonder) awhile, although perhaps not somewhere to linger too long.
The whole sprawling necropolis has something of the atmosphere of a sacred grove, an impression enhanced by the call of a distant cuckoo and occasional nervous outbursts from a somewhat reticent nightingale.
Some of the tombs are of Roman origin while others are older — probably pre-Christian Thracian. Most have been looted for valuables at some time or other. The most impressive of the group sits on its own near the top of the slope: a domed structure with curved roof stones that fit together like segments of an orange.
As a precaution, wooden support posts have been installed to prevent the collapse of the structure. Thought to date from between the 5th and 3rd century BC, this is also the oldest of all the Thracian tombs on the site. As with the others, it would have originally been covered with a mound of soil but these were removed when the area was mined for copper, iron and marble blocks, a process that caused many of the stone shafts and supports to collapse and give the site its modern-day name Propada, which means ‘collapsed’ in Bulgarian.
Remnants of ancient Thracian graves at the Propada site near Malko Tărnovo (photo © Laurence Mitchell).
Mishkova Niva
Next morning, a surprise thunderstorm gives way to grey drizzle — poor weather for exploring tombs but an opportunity to investigate Malko Tărnovo’s museum. Like several other buildings around town, the museum is a handsome wooden structure in typical Bulgarian style.
Annoyingly, I find that the door is locked despite what the sign outside says about opening hours. A light is on but whoever is on duty clearly does not want to be bothered with unannounced visitors. At least I am able to peruse the lapidarium outside — a selection of fragmented Roman pieces that include a headless toga-wrapped figure. The most intriguing piece though is a mysterious stone pediment that is decorated with a spear, a shield and a disembodied pair of hands.
When the rain eventually stops that afternoon I set out for the other major Thracian site in the area, the sanctuary known as Mishkova Niva (Мишкова нива). The route to reach it follows a lonely track through forest where butterflies flit between the wild flowers at the wayside. Here and there, where the forest slopes away from the road, there are long views south into Turkey — the same sylvan landscape under a different flag.
Mishkova Niva lies in a clearing a little way from the track. A Bulgarian family has arrived just before me and I leave them to it as the mother wanders through the ruins collecting wild flowers. While I wait I examine the heavily weathered information board that stands at the site. The information is in Bulgarian but I can see from the photographs that the pediment I had seen earlier at the Malko Tărnovo museum had once been in place here over the tomb entrance.
The family leaves and I have the site to myself. The accepted archeological interpretation is that Mishkova Niva grew up around the tomb of a 3rd-century Thracian chief. Gradually, over the next half millennium, a sanctuary dedicated to the sun god Apollo developed around this original tomb. In terms of what can be seen on the ground, the complex essentially consists of two large stone circles with a domed tomb at its centre that resembles an igloo made of stone blocks. Someone has placed a few apples and a paper cup of liquor on one of the stones — presumably a votive offering.
There have been considerable shifts on the geopolitical map since the sanctuary was built; Mishkova Niva, which has been under both Byzantine and Ottoman tutelage at different times since, now sits on the border of two modern countries. It’s a frontier that has long been both political and religious — a place where the Orthodox Christianity of south-east Bulgaria meets the Islam of European Turkey.
The site was not excavated until the 1980s and, given its proximity to the Turkish frontier, would have been firmly off-limits for locals and foreigners alike during the Communist period when this same frontier separated countries loyal to the Warsaw Pact on one side and NATO on the other.
The Strandzha region of south-east Bulgaria
The only other settlement of any size within the limits of the Strandzha National Park is the small town of Ahtopol (Ахтопол) on the Black Sea coast — a modest resort whose main attraction, Ahtopol Beach, has the ring of a Cold War spy thriller. Although a back road through the forests links Malko Tărnovo with nearby Tsarevets on the coast, to reach Ahtopol by public transport it is necessary to retrace steps to Burgas first before taking another minibus south. Ahtopol lies close to the end of the road, the penultimate settlement before the Turkish frontier. The very last place is Rezovo (Резово), a small community featured in hidden europe 12.
The Black Sea coast
Travelling down the coast towards Ahtopol, we bypass a number of overdeveloped resorts where, in the spirit of Mishkova Niva, a modern-day version of the sun god — a deity propitiated with cold beer and suntan lotion — is still worshipped. Ahtopol, it would appear, remains less tainted by mass tourism and has yet to succumb fully, although all the signs point to it going that same way before too long.
Despite appearances, Ahtopol is an ancient place. Positioned at the frontier of warring Bulgarian and Byzantine empires, and prone to regular attacks by Black Sea pirates, the town has been burned and destroyed many times over. Originally the site of an ancient Thracian settlement, and later a Greek trade port known as Agatopolis, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century its Greek population was gradually replaced by Bulgarian refugees from Turkish Thrace. A devastating fire in 1918 resulted in a complete rebuild of the town. These days it is mostly hotels and apartment complexes that are being constructed.
Ahtopol wears its history lightly. Unlike the villages of the Strandzha interior there are few old wooden buildings to be seen and no ancient monuments other than the ruins of a 5th-century fortress. It feels like a town on the threshold, a resort waiting for an influx of tourists that may or may not arrive.
Most of its hotels lie empty and, in late May, the town seems locked in pre-season inertia: soothingly quiet, with just the occasional echo of a builder’s hammer to disturb the peace. Many of the town’s cafés are also closed for business — the busiest place by far is an outdoor restaurant right by the harbour, a place that is evidently popular with families and groups of underemployed policemen.
There are no specific sights apart from the fortress ruins, and few distractions other than cliff walks that offer splendid views out to the Black Sea, which is actually more a darker shade of ultramarine than black. There is also, of course, the beach.
The path that leads down to Ahtopol Beach passes an almost-finished apartment block where workmen are busy painting window frames in readiness for the new season. Hidden away in the bushes of a piece of waste ground opposite, a nightingale is singing. This one is anything but reticent. On the beach, sunloungers and umbrellas are lined up in rows ready for action. But there are no takers — the beach is empty apart from a solitary couple sunbathing at the water’s edge.
Silhouetted out to sea, a small fishing boat is hauling in its nets to an audience of frenzied gulls. A timeless scene, it is an echo of the old ways; a reminder that no matter how many times the tenure of this quiet, far-flung corner of Europe changes it will always be the sea — although not necessarily sand and sun — that gives this place its meaning.
