A complete town plan
Streets, house boundaries, four churches and smithing furnaces.
Borislavlm87 — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Камен Ханджиев — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Камен Ханджиев — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Камен Ханджиев — CC BY-SA 4.0
The archaeological site of a fortified medieval town near Sevlievo in central Bulgaria, belonging to the First and Second Bulgarian Empires. The site is wider than a fortress: it was a complete settlement on a hill, with walls, towers, churches, workshops, houses and streets. It flourished from the ninth to the fourteenth century, then was destroyed in the Ottoman conquest of the 1390s and permanently abandoned. What makes it interesting is the preservation: because the site was abandoned and nothing was built over it afterwards, the town's plan survives complete underground. Excavation has revealed the streets, the house boundaries, the foundations of four churches and smithing furnaces, so you walk through the layout of a medieval Bulgarian town rather than a fortress alone. Parts of the walls and the main gate have been rebuilt, and the rest is exposed foundations. The site is in open countryside and needs a car.
Streets, house boundaries, four churches and smithing furnaces.
Nothing was built over it after 1390, so its plan survived.
The main gate and parts of the wall have been raised again.
Near Sevlievo, central Bulgaria
The first was founded in 681 when Byzantium recognised a Bulgar state south of the Danube; it adopted Christianity in 864 and saw the golden age of Slavonic letters, in which the Cyrillic alphabet was devised. It fell to Byzantium in 1018. The second arose in 1185 through the Asen uprising and lasted until the Ottoman conquest of 1396. Between them lie about a century and a half of direct Byzantine rule.
The area is in the heart of Bulgaria and close to several sites: Hotalich fortress, the town of Gabrovo with its Etar open-air museum of working water-powered workshops, and the Sokolski monastery. And the Hotnitsa waterfall and Emen gorge to the east. The area is rural and needs a car, but it gathers history and landscape in a relatively small space.
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