Varna and Plovdiv both have lovely pedestrian zones with photogenic old buildings, and lots and lots of slightly less photogenic soviet-era and more recent apartment buildings. They both also have LOTS of casinos - we haven't ventured into any them though they might be interesting spots to watch the mafia pass by. All the people we've seen are perfectly nice and non-gangster-looking, but apparently the Plovdiv Lokomotiv football club lost 5 managers in 12 years by assassination, so it does sound as if there are some tough types out there.
Plovdiv will be the 2019 European City of Culture, and is in the middle of branding and merchandising for it. One effort is Plovediv - printed on mugs, t-shirts etc - which does seem to be risking retaliation in the form of Plovdive (which wouldn't be fair at all).
Yesterday we decided to leave town and head for the nearest hills, the Rhodopi mountains. It's only 20 km by (slow) train from Plovdiv to Asenovgrad, so that's where we started. About 2 km out of Asenovgrad there is a ruined fortress and church perched dramatically atop a rather steep hill, so we set out to walk there.
Up until now Google Maps has largely been my friend, but lately it's been acting like the sort of friend who promises to give you a ride home from a party but then has too much to drink and falls asleep in the corner. GM assured us that the way to walk to the fortress was to walk along the main road ... and GM was wrong (unless we wanted to stand on the main road and admire the fortress from below, or scramble up a couple of hundred metres of scree). Luckily we followed the road signs instead (sorry, GM) and made it to the fortress with no problems at all other than a bit of robust discussion.
I'd read that from the fortress it's possible to walk to the next village, Bachkovo, where there's a famous monastery. All I could find on the internet was one brief mention of a roman road that would take about three and a half hours to walk (with an even briefer mention of a steep cart track at some point), and GM was just baffling. I know it's not always wise to walk along main roads ("main" being a relative term here), but GM seemed to have a serious snitch against walking on the local road.
In a spirit of "what could possibly go wrong" we set out anyway, along a lovely smooth portion of old Roman road that led to a nearby chapel. From there the track clearly continued, but with no signpost to say where it was heading. We figured it would be easy enough to scramble down to the main road if the track turned out to be heading away from the village (ha!), and carried on. All we knew was that there would be the steep bit, and a ruined Roman bridge, and that at parts the track might be a bit hard to find. All of that was certainly true. We saw no other people at all on the trail, though the occasional cigarette butt and pile of donkey dung reassured us that other people do occasionally pass along it. After a while we realised that there actually were trail markers, white and green stripes painted on trees and rocks, and the occasional arrow where the trail forked. And about halfway to the village there was even a sign saying Bachkovo, which was definitely a Good Sign.
The Roman road portions of the track were lovely easy walking - flat and wide with stone walls supporting the edges. Other bits were pure bush track. And the "steep cart track" was slabs of concrete and then stone set into dried mud at about a 25 degree incline ... almost bearable up to what appeared to be the crest of the hill, but of course there was more, and then more, and I made the mistake of using some of my breath to curse out loud at the sight of more climb to come. Luckily that was in the first hour of the walk, so there was plenty of time to recover and enjoy the walk after that.
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