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Regular buses make the 25-kilometre journey west from Montana to the carpet-making village of CHIPROVTSI , nestling beneath the highest mountains of the northeast, their jagged peaks marking the frontier between Bulgaria and Serbia. Chiprovtsi was an important gold and silver mining centre in the late middle ages, and Saxon miners were encouraged to settle here, bringing new technology, Catholicism and blond-haired, blue-eyed blood lines in their wake. Despite the Ottoman conquest, the village went on to become an important centre of Catholic learning, with local children being sent to Italy for training in the priesthood. Seventeenth-century statesmen Peter Bogdan Bakshev (Catholic Archbishop of Sofia) and Peter Parchevich (Archbishop of Marcianopolis - modern-day Devnya) were born in Chiprovtsi and spent most of their lives trying to persuade the rulers of Europe to give the oppressed Balkan Slavs a helping hand. Neither lived to see the glorious failure that was the Chiprovtsi Uprising of 1688 , when the Austrian army's successes against the Turks persuaded many in the Bulgarian northwest that the hour of their liberation was nigh. Unfortunately the advancing Austrians were slow in reaching Chiprovtsi, by which time the Ottomans had razed the village to the ground and scattered its inhabitants. It wasn't until 1737 that their descendants were allowed back. Iron-ore mining was a mainstay of the local economy right up until the late 1990s, giving the place a gruff, working-class feel, and the village's proximity to what was until 1989 a closed border zone means that tourism is still very much in its infancy. However Chiprovtsi is surrounded by some of the best scenery in the northwest, and for those prepared to rough it a bit, a short stay here has its rewards.
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