Belogradchik Travel Video Guide

Belogradchik Travel Itinerary

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Lying in a bowl beneath the hills just east of the Serbian border, BELOGRADCHIK (literally "small white town") gives its name to Bulgaria's most spectacular rock formations, the Belogradchishkite skali , which cover an area of 90 square kilometres to the west. The limestone rocks greatly impressed French traveller Adolph Blanqui in 1841, who described them as an "undreamt landscape" rising to heights of 200m in shades of scarlet, buff and grey, with shapes suggestive of "animals, ships or houses, Egyptian obelisks" and "enormous stalagmites".

The towering rocks nearest the town form a natural fortress whose defensive potential has been exploited since ancient times. Begun by the Romans, continued by the Bulgars during the eighth century, and completed by the Turks a millennium later, the castle at Belogradchik used to command the eastern approaches to the Belogradchik Pass. Although no longer in use, the pass was for centuries the

main trade route linking the lower Danube with the settlements of Serbia's Morava Valley. In Ottoman times the citadel and its garrison served to intimidate and control the local populace, and hundreds of Bulgarian insurgents were held here after the failed uprising of 1850. One particularly unsavoury tale relates that many of the prisoners were slaughtered when the Ottomans forced them to pass through a low doorway, only to have their heads lopped off by swordsmen lurking on the other side

Your Tips For Belogradchik

• Shipka Pass Bulgaria Travel Videos
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  For drama and majestic vistas, few routes in Bulgaria match crossing the SHIPKA PASS . - Bulgaria
  

• Rhodopes Bulgaria Travel Videos
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  According to Thracian mythology, the mortal lovers Hem and Rhodopis dared call themselves after the divine Zeus and Hera, who duly punished the couple by turning them into mountains separated by the River Maritsa - him the Balkans and she the Rhodopes . - Bulgaria
  

• Kazanlak Bulgaria Travel Videos
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  Forty kilometres beyond Kalofer, KAZANLAK is the capital of the rose-growing region, although you wouldn't necessarily realize that unless you pass through town during the first weekend of June, when the long-standing but fairly lacklustre Festival of Roses ( Praznik na Rozata ) takes place. - Bulgaria
  

• Southwest Bulgaria Travel Videos
  Bulgaria Travel Itinerary
  The landscape of Bulgaria south of the capital is dominated by the River Struma, which rises on the southern slopes of Mt Vitosha before sweeping west then south through a series of arid gorges and fertile flood plains. - Bulgaria
  

• Sredna Gora Bulgaria Travel Videos
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  ? So, proudly you may gaze Unto the Sredna Gora, the forest's single queen, And hear the ring of swords, and all this song can mean ? - Pencho Slaveykov, The Song of the Blood The Sredna Gora or "Central Highlands" stretch from the Pancharevo defile outside Sofia almost as far as Yambol on the Thracian plain. - Bulgaria
  

• Black Sea Coast Bulgaria Travel Videos
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  The Bulgarian Black Sea coast has quietened down a bit since its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, when it served as the playground for the entire Eastern bloc, but it is still a magnet for hundreds of thousands of Bulgarians and foreign visitors. - Bulgaria
  

• Balkan Range Bulgaria Travel Videos
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  The Balkan Range cuts right across the country, a forbidding swathe of rock known to the Bulgarians as the Stara planina - the "Old Mountains". - Bulgaria
  

• Stara Zagora Bulgaria Travel Videos
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  STARA ZAGORA means "Old Town Behind the Mountain", an apt name for this settlement on the far flanks of the eastern Sredna Gora, with a history of occupation stretching back some 7000 years. - Bulgaria
  

• Sofia Bulgaria Travel Videos
  Bulgaria Travel Itinerary
  According to its motto, SOFIA "grows but does not age" ( raste no ne staree ): a tribute to the mushrooming suburbs occupied by one-tenth of Bulgaria's population, and a cryptic reference to its ancient origins. - Bulgaria
  

• Plovdiv Bulgaria Travel Videos
  Bulgaria Travel Itinerary
  Lucian the Greek called PLOVDIV "the biggest and most beautiful of all towns" in Thrace; he might have added "and Bulgaria", for the country's second-largest city (with a population of 360,000) is one of its most attractive and vibrant centres, with arguably more to recommend it than Sofia, which the proud locals tend to regard with some disdain. - Bulgaria