THE WESTERN STARA PLANINA
Berkovitsa Vratsa
Vurshets
The Iskur Gorge
Koprivshtitsa
Etropol and Teteven
BERKOVITSA (Берковица)
From Sofia route 81 crosses the Stara Planina by the attractive Petrohan pass to the mountain town of Berkovitsa. A pleasant detour on the way is the village of Godech and the Sveti Duh (Holy Spirit) Monastery on the road out of Godech going towards Bukorovtsi.
Nestling beneath the highest peak of the western Balkan range, Mount Kom (2016 mtrs.) and the three peaks known as Todorini Kukli (Todor`s Dolls -1785 mtrs) at about 450 mtrs. above sea level, Berkovitsa`s mild, sunny winters and temperate summers have long made it a popular resort for Sofians. Many own dachas in the town or come to walk or hunt in the mountains. Berkovitsa was built on the site of a Roman village, some of whose remains (in particular a banya or bath-house) and the remains of early Christian basilicas can be seen scattered throughout the town and its immediate environs. It grew from the fifteenth century on the production of marble from quarries in the nearby Burzia valley and small quantities of gold (now worked out). Modern Berkovitsa is built around its central square, dominated by the concrete murals of the chitalishte and, at the far end of the square, a Turkish clock tower of 1762, once the tower of a mosque. Behind the chitalishte is the Ethnographic Museum. A short walk back through the old town takes you to the house (now a museum) of Ivan Vazov, the grand old man of Bulgarian literature, who lived briefly here from 1879-80 while recovering from tuberculosis. Local legend has it that the townspeople speeded his recovery by bundling pliant Turkish girls over his wall of an evening. There are two churches close by, Sveta Bogoroditsa (the Church of the Virgin Mary) of 1835 with icons by the Samokov masters Dimitur and Zahari Zograf and the 1871 Sveta Nikola with an iconostasis by Stoyan Fandukov also from Samokov. Finally you may recover from the walk with a glass or two of the area`s other celebrated products, malinovo vino (raspberry wine) or yagodovo vino (strawberry wine).
From the town there are hiking trails up Mount Kom and from there two circular walks back to the town through the depopulated countryside, one west over the smaller peak of Kamara and one east over the top of the Petrohan pass, Todorini Kukli and the Klisurski Monastery.
Vratsa is a pleasant town at the foot of a part of the Stara Planina known as the Vratsa Balkan. Its name comes from the Vratsata Pass, an ancient trading route south-west of the town which joins the Iskur Gorge, itself derived from the Bulgarian for gate (vrata). During the First Kingdom, Vratsa was an important trading and military centre, specialising in the production of gold and silver ware, eventually eclipsed by Sofia. Today it is an ideal base from which to explore the mountain scenery of that part of the Vratsa Balkan covered by the Vrachanki Karst National Park. The town is a collection of quiet, sometimes tree-lined streets centred around the expanse of Pl. Hristo Botev, which holds the Regional History Museum, among a cluster of municipal buildings. The Museum has an extensive display of local artefacts, including a stunning collection of Thacian silverware, 165 silver vessels unearthed in the nearby village of Rogozen, thought to be the family silverware of a noble of the Triballi tribe dating from c.400BC. It also gives a prominent space to an exhibition about Bulgaria’s national poet, Hristo Botev (see Literature), who died near Vratsa in a skirmish with Ottoman forces in 1876. The Tower of Kurt Pasha stands next to the museum, an Ottoman defensive tower house of a type built throughout the region in the 17th century during the rebellion of the governor of Vidin, Ozman Pazvantoglu. A second tower, the Tower of the Meski, dating from the same period, and now a clock tower stands at the opposite end of the square behind the Hemus Hotel. A short walk up Ul. Hadjitoshev takes you to the St. Sophronius of Vratsa Ethnographic Museum in a complex of old houses, a former school and a church. Sophronius, an 18th c. priest, published one of the first books in Bulgarian, Nedelnik, (literally the Sunday book), a collection of sermons based on old Slavic texts. A little further down the square opposite the court house, Ul. Voyvodov takes you to the Nikola Voyvodov House-Museum which contains a permanent exhibition about Voyvodov, a 19th c. fighter for national liberation.
At the southern end of the square, behind the pretty Sv. Nikolai church, Ul. Pop Sava Katrafilov leads past the Tourist Information Centre, and following a brown sign to Ledenika cave, route 1002 leads up into the Vratsata Pass. On foot a 25 minute walk takes you past the hotel Chaika to a parking place and a footbridge to the first of eight clearly marked footpaths around the reserve. This one goes to Skaklya Falls, the highest in the Balkans (dry in summer). Further up a path leads to a wooden boardwalk under 400m high karst cliffs. Maps of all the paths are available from the Tourist Information Centre.
At the end of the road, past the pretty village of Zgorigrad, is the Ledenika Cave. This huge cave complex is open to the public and a walk around its impressive rock formations takes about an hour. The biggest of the caves is called the Concert Hall and hosts an annual concert during the Botev celeberations in Vratsa which take place between the 24th of May and the 2nd of June.
Outside Vratsa a minor road off the main Vidin – Sofia road takes you to the village of Chelopek and above it a monument to Hristo Botev which also has superb views across the Danube plain. In the village, the House of Baba Iliytsa, a one room restored National Revival house celebrates the life of a village woman who put her own life at risk trying to save Hristo Botev’s rebels. In a short story by Ivan Vasov, A Bulgarian Woman, she is called Baba Iliytsa, hence the name of the house.
Vurshets is a small spa town half-way between Vratsa and Berkovitsa, a handy base for walking in the western Stara Planina. The therapeutic and medicinal properties of the springs were first mentioned in the 6 thc. when it was known as Medeca. In 1910 the first modern spa baths were built and others followed such that in the 1930’s it was known as the Baden-Baden of the Balkans. There is a museum in the centre of town, whose prize exhibit is a 2nd c. BC bronze sculpture of the boy-god Telesfor, found near the town.
From the main square, almost any path or road southward takes you to the Sun Park, a 1930’s addition to the town, and from there a number of footpaths take you to the mountains. A path to Ivanchova Polyana (Ivan’s meadow) past the Raiski Cut waterfall takes you on to Korichkov Chukar peak (667m). From there a path to the east leads up to Garishte (992m) and to the west to the hizha Bialata Voda.
Klisura Monastery is a short drive from Vurshets (on the road to Berkovitsa, a marked turn off at the village of Tsvetkova Bara). Dating back to the 12th century but sacked many times by the Turks and destroyed by a fire in 1862, little remains of the original complex. It was rebuilt after the fire and now comprises 2 churches, 3 beautiful National Revival style monastery buildings and a farm. A footpath from the monastery is the easiest way to get to the summit of Todorini Kukli (about 3 hours walk)
The villages around Vurshets are picturesque. Dolna Bela Rechka and Gorna Bela Rechka on the first minor road off the main road to Vratsa are two of the prettiest. A tradition says that the woman of the village are descendants of boyars, Bulgarian nobles, who fled the Turks in the 15thc. Past the villages the road continues through the mountains to Milanovo.
From the top of the Petrohan Pass above Berkovitsa a footpath takes the adventurous walker the 20 kilometres or so east to the next great pass over the Stara Planina, the Iskur Gorge. The gorge, with its impressive rock formations, some over 800 feet high, and picturesque villages clinging to the hillsides, is the valley of the River Iskur which flows from near Sofia to the Danube. The most comfortable way of seeing the gorge as a day trip from Sofia is to take a train to Mezdra from Sofia (any train to Varna, not all trains stop at all the little halts in the gorge) although a road also follows the gorge from the Novi Iskur turn off on the Sofia ring road. The gorge proper starts after leaving Novi Iskur and winds between rock walls to the village of Batuliya, whose railway halt is called Tompsun, in commemoration of a member of a British mission to aid Bulgarian partisans, Major Frank Thompson (brother of historian, E P Thompson) who died here in 1944 in a clash with police. A memorial in the village celebrates the 24 who died with him. Beyond Gara Lakatnik some thirty kilometres up the gorge the scenery becomes breathtakingly impressive and the area between here and the final gorge town, Liutinbrod, is popular with climbers and walkers. Further up the gorge are two Second Kingdom Monasteries, the Monastery of Sedemte Prestola (Seven Altars - eleven kilometres down a minor road from the village of Eliseina) and Cherepish Monastery near the village of the same name. Cherepish was sacked by the Turks and most of the current buildings date from the nineteenth century, but some icons on display by masters from Tryavna and Macedonia are exquisite. West of the town of Liutinbrod are the geological curiosities known as the Ritlite Rocks, three parallel walls of rock climbing impressively up the hillside in imitation of their local nickname, the `Cart Rails`.
KOPRIVSHTITSA (Копривщица)
Koprivshtitsa is one of the most beautiful of Bulgaria’s museum-villages and, because it is also one of the few where people still live and work, there is a bustling life about it which adds to its attractions. Nestling in the valley of the river Topolnitsa beneath the northern slopes of the Sredna Gora mountain range, it is an ancient and attractive settlement whose winding and narrow streets are full of delicately carved half-timbered houses and old churches. The origins of the name are obscure, but it is thought that the village was founded and named in the 14th century by Karakachan shepherds who grazed their sheep on the mountain slopes nearby in the summer months. It seems to have grown relatively quickly, by the end of the 18th century there was for then a large population of 12000 who prospered on the production of woollen cloth and carpets traded throughout the Ottoman Empire.
Despite, or perhaps because of, being burned and looted three times in the late 18th and early 19th centuries by Turkish Kurdzhali (outlaws) it became an important centre of the Bulgarian independence movement. The second Bulgarian school (after Gabrovo) was founded in 1837 by Neophit Rilski and revolutionaries such as Liuben Karavelov (whose restored house is one of the memorial houses), Benkovski and Kableshkov and the poet Dimcho Debelyanov were born in Koprivshtitsa. The unsuccessful April Rising of 1876 began here (see History) and after it was ruthlessly put down by the Turks, the village only avoided destruction by paying a large ransom.
The village today is the living epitome of the fictional village, Byala Cherkva in which Ivan Vazov set his seminal novel of the uprising, `Under the Yoke` (see Literature). Much of what happened in the novel also happened here, the capture of the Konak, the defense of the village with cannons made of cherry-tree trunks and home-made gun-powder and the Turks` final bloody reckoning. It is easy, walking through the narrow streets, to imagine here the life of Boicho the revolutionary and Rada the schoolteacher, Vazov`s two doomed lovers. After independence the commercial life of the new country moved to the lowland towns and Koprivshtitsa declined to the agricultural village the visitor sees today.
There are over 30 memorial houses, churches and museums listed in a map that can be bought at the Museum office (the old pharmacy) on a corner of the village’s central square, which also contains a monument to the April uprising and a mexana. The office also sells tickets for the memorial houses and a group ticket which allows you to see them all.
The most impressive of the memorial houses is adjacent to the museum office, the Oslekov House. Nencho Oslekov was a merchant with a penchant for travel, bringing back with him materials and ideas for the house, including the impressive columns of Lebanon cedar that support the front and the wall paintings on the facade of a townscape very like Venice. Built in 1856 by Mincho of Samokov, the ground floor rooms give a good picture of domestic life of the period. Upstairs is the guest room, the Red Room, overlooking the quiet of the garden and laid out in the Turkish influenced style of the period with the broad, low window seats, doubling as beds that can still be seen in older Bulgarian houses and an impressively decorated wooden ceiling. On the wall is a medallion showing the original symmetrical plan of the house, never completed because Oslekov`s neighbour refused to sell him the land. Oslekov himself died after the uprising in a Turkish prison.
A short walk uphill and a turn right takes you to the house, built before 1840 by his grandfather, of the poet Dimcho Debelyanov, after whom the street is also named. Debelyanov`s short life (he died fighting in Greece in 1916 at the age of 29) is celebrated in photographs and a reconstruction of his study. None of his poetry was published during his lifetime, but is now popular, particularly the later poems about life in the trenches of the First World War.
Back along Ul. Debelyanov is the attractive Church of the Assumption, in the graveyard of which is a monument to Debelyanov by Ivan Lazarov inspired by one of his poems. A line from the poem, `Waiting in a gentle dream, she becomes her own child`, about a mother waiting for her son to return from the war, is inscribed on the monument. The church itself was built in 1817, sunk into the ground because of a Turkish decree. The icononstasis from 1821 is by a master from Tryavna and some of the later icons were painted by the Samokov artist, Zachary Zograf.
A little further uphill from the church and a turn left is the house of Todor Kableshkov, the revolutionary who gave the first signal for the uprising. Kableshkov was born in 1854 and after studying in Constantinople returned to Sofia to become one of Vasil Levski`s Apostles (see History). He committed suicide in prison in Gabrovo after the Uprising. The ground floor of this imposing house, built to the symmetrical plan that Oslekov never achieved, is a reconstruction of the interior of a typical 19th century house, including a room with a spinning wheel and loom where some of the woollen goods that were the basis of Koprivshtitsa`s wealth were produced. On the upper floor is a museum of the Uprising, including among other military material one of the renowned and unreliable cherry-wood cannons. Behind the house is a monument celebrating the beginning of the uprising and Kableshkov`s role in it and downhill from this is the little bridge where the first shot was fired, appropriately called just that, the First Shot Bridge (Most Purva Pooshka).
Across the river from the central square is the house of another of the great revolutionaries, Lyuben Karavelov, and his brother Petko who twice became Prime Minister. Born in 1834, Karavelov was educated first in Plovdiv and then in Moscow where he published the first of a series of works on Bulgarian customs and way of life. Forced to leave Moscow during a period of repression of the raznochintzy (liberal intellectuals not of noble origin), he moved to Belgrade, where he was imprisoned briefly by the Austrians, and subsequently in 1869 to Bucharest. In Bucharest he published the émigré newspaper Svoboda, (Freedom) advocating an armed uprising against the Turks and he and Vasil Levski founded the Revolutionary Central Committee. Karavelov returned to Bulgaria in 1876 where he again published a political newspaper, Nachalo (The Beginning) and a Slavic Bibliographical Dictionary. He died in 1879 in Russe of lung disease.
The house has a similar interior to the Kabaleshkov house and has as an exhibit, Karavelov`s printing press. On the same bank of the river but at the opposite end of the town taking a left up Ul. Yako Dorosiev is the house of Georgi Benkovski, another revolutionary but one who stayed in Bulgaria. Benkovski was the leader of his local cheta and the tailor who made their uniforms with a distinctive Bulgarian lion badge (exhibited in the the house). He was killed, along with most of his cheta, in a skirmish with the Turks near Teteven.
GETTING THERE
Koprivishtitsa is a plausible day-trip from Sofia - catch the 7.30 am train from the central Station (Centralna Gara) which is met by a local bus at Koprivishtitsa station about 10 kilometres from the village and return in the evening the same way. Similarly buses meet trains from Bourgas and buses also go to Sredna Gore and Karlovo from the bus station south of the central square.
ETROPOL (Етрополе) and TETEVEN (Тетевен)
This area of the Stara Planina, bounded by an interesting monastery at Etropole and the old town of Teteven, is a pleasant and unspoilt little mountain backwater, giving the casual visitor an insight into mountain life. The village of Pravets, near Etropole, was the birthplace of the communist leader, Todor Zhivkov and thus suitably and not unpleasantly modernised. Buses go irregularly to Teteven from Sofia or alternately catch a train to Srednogorie (1 hour) and bus to Etropole from there, the area also makes a pleasant day-trip by car from Sofia.
Etropole was formerly a mining town, the Romans used slave-labour to extract iron and copper and protected it with massive fortifications of which little remain. Today it is a sleepy village with the ubiquitous clock tower and a small town museum. Two miles beyond the village on the road to Yamna is the monastery of Sv. Troiska. The complex dates back to 1158 but during the 16th and 17th centuries the monks went to great pains to copy and distribute the great works of Bulgarian literature and thus it became an important centre for the preservation and dissemination of Bulgarian culture. The interesting church is a later addition (1858).
Teteven can be reached by taking a mountain back road from the monastery or returning to the E79 and taking a turning off through the village of Golyam Izvor.
Famously described by Ivan Vasov `If I had not come to Teteven, I should regard myself as a stranger in my native land. I have travelled ...in Europe and traversed Bulgaria from end to end, but nowhere have I found a place so enchanting as this.`, Teteven lies in a magnificent landscape at the head of the valley of the river Vit beneath the bulk of Mount Vezhen (2196m -7137 ft.), the highest peak in this part of the Stara Planina. The town itself is a pleasant market town, with only a town museum and some restored National Revival houses of specific interest, but the opportunity to explore the mountains from here is its main attraction, in particular on the road south to the little village resort of Ribaritsa from where a network of well-marked paths criss-cross the southern massif known as Tetevenska Planina and a long distance path (50 km.) leads eastward to Troian (see Stara Planina) by way of the peak Vasiliov Vruh (1490m. - 4842 ft.). One particularly interesting path leads to the peak known colourfully as Tetvenska Baba (Tetven`s grandmother - 2071m. 6724 ft.), west of Vezhen, from which the view of the Teteven valley is superb. In a cave near the village the revolutionary hero Georgi Benkovski dissolved his cheta after the failure of the April Uprising in 1876 (see Koprivishtitsa) and further on the road to the village of Kostina there is a monument to him.