History
The area around Kazanlak has attracted successive waves of settlers and invaders, not least because of its strategic importance in controlling approaches to the Shipka Pass. In ancient times, the Tundzha Valley was the domain of the Thracian Odrysae , who exploited the vacuum left by the retreat of the Persians in the fifth century BC, to forge a powerful tribal state on the southern slopes of the Balkan Range. Their power was temporarily broken by Philip II of Macedon in 342 BC, but they re-emerged a generation later under King Seuthes III , an unruly vassal of Alexander the Great's successor Lysimachus, who built a new capital, Seuthopolis, 7km west of present-day Kazanlak - now submerged beneath a reservoir. The river Tundzha is thought to have been navigable as far as Seuthopolis in ancient times, bringing trade, profits and Hellenistic culture to the Odrysae - who expressed their wealth in the solid, but exquisitely decorated tombs which abound in the region. Seuthopolis soon fell into decline however, and a deluge of Celts occurred around 280 BC, many of whom settled in the plain just east of Kazanlak. There was a fortified medieval Bulgarian settlement at Kran, just to the northwest (where a village of the same name still exists), but the town of Kazanlak itself is relatively modern, dating from the Ottoman occupation. Its name loosely translates as the "place of the copper cauldrons", a likely reference to the giant stills in which rose oil was prepared. By the turn of the century Kazanlak's streets were filled with the shops and store-houses of the rose merchants - a breed of Balkan trader that has long since disappeared, squeezed out by social ownership and state control.
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