History

An ancient Thracian site, rebuilt and renamed by Philip II of Macedon in 342 BC, classical Philippopolis was initially little more than a military outpost designed to keep a watchful eye over the troublesome natives. It was a rough frontier town that the Macedonians deliberately colonized with criminals and outcasts; the Roman writer Pliny later identified it with Poneropolis, the semi-legendary "City of Thieves". Under Roman rule urban culture developed apace, with the town's position on the Belgrade-Constantinople highway bringing both economic wealth and a strategic role in the defence of Thrace.

Plovdiv was sacked by the Huns in 447, and by the seventh century, with the Danube frontier increasingly breached by barbarians, the city was in decline. With the arrival of the Bulgars, Byzantine control over the area became increasingly tenuous. "Once upon a time", lamented Byzantine chronicler Anna Comnena in the twelfth century, "Philippopolis must have been a large and beautiful city, but after the Tauri and Scyths [Slavs] enslaved the inhabitants ? it was reduced to the condition in which we saw it". In Comnena's time Philippopolis was a notorious hotbed of heretics, a situation usually blamed on local Armenians, who migrated to Thrace en masse in the eighth and tenth centuries, bringing with them the dualistic doctrines of Manichaeanism and Paulicianism. Although these heresies eventually fizzled out, Plovdiv's Armenian population has endured to this day.

The Byzantine town was further damaged by the Bulgarian Tsar Kaloyan in 1206, and it was a rather run-down place that the Turks inherited in the fourteenth century, renaming it Filibe. It soon recovered as a commercial centre, with a thriving Muslim quarter, complete with bazaars and mosques, growing up at the base of the hill where Plovdiv's Christian communities continued to live. Many of the latter were rising members of a rich mercantile class by the mid-nineteenth century, and they expressed their affluence in the construction of opulent town houses that showcased the very best of native arts and crafts. Plovdiv's urban elite also patronized Bulgarian culture, and had the Great Powers of Europe not broken up the infant state of Bulgaria at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, Plovdiv would probably have been designated as its capital. In the event, it became instead the main city of Eastern Rumelia , an Ottoman province administered by a Christian governor-general. Much of the Christian population naturally wanted union with the rest of Bulgaria, which was finally attained in 1885.

Plovdiv has continued to rival Sofia as a cultural and business centre ever since, not least because of the international trade fairs held here in May and September. With its longstanding liberal-bourgeois tradition, Plovdiv is politically the "bluest" city in Bulgaria, a stronghold of the conservative SDS since the demise of Communism, whose proximity to Turkey and Greece has ensured that private enterprise has flourished here more than anywhere else in the country.

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