A different colonial yoke
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This was August 15 which is celebrated as the Virgin Mary’s day. The streets nearby were lined up with women on improvised seats, selling flowers for the occasion.
Inside there were delicate wood carvings around the ceilings and low doors connecting several rooms. The roofs had flat tiles. The Kuyumdzhiogh House which was turned into the Ethnographic Museum had a pretty garden in front.
What these “Danube Bulgarians” have in common with the other Slavs is, of course, Orthodox Christianity --whereas, the Volga Bulgarians who settled further East chose Islam. We were reminded of this as we walked passed the Church of Sts. Konstantin and Elena. Worshipers in their best clothes were going in with flowers in their hands.
Second and third floors were larger than the first floors, counter-levered for maximal use of the limited ground space. The buildings, such as the Turkish merchant Georgiadi’s House, were decorated on the outside.
These were substantial homes built closely side-by-side along narrow cobblestone streets. Their windows almost touched.
Further down the hill, a Roman stadium is left half uncovered in the center of town so as not to unduly encroach on its two neighbors which were themselves monuments to different eras of the history of Plovdiv: a statue of Philip the Macedonia king who ruled here in 4 th Century BC, standing as tall as the diamond-patterned minaret of the 15 th Century Dzhumaya (Community) Mosque of the Ottoman rulers next to it.
The Romans who came here in the 1 st Century also built an amphitheater which is the best preserved in the Balkans. On the day of my visit it was being staged for one of the frequent performances which benefit from the amphitheater’s great acoustics and marble seats.
In the one-year war with Turkey, the Russians lost some 200,000 soldiers, many of them at this strategic location where the Bulgarian militia armed with mere rocks helped in repulsing a major Ottoman attack.
Down in the valley, the 1890 Shipka Memorial Church with gleaming golden onion domes [14] graphically depicts the Russian victory.
The other was wood carving which we saw demonstrated in the Etar Village Museum, an hour’s drive from Veliko Tarnovo. Life as lived since the middle of the 18 th century was on display here. “In some villages nearby much is still the same,” we were told. Laundry was washed in a spinning device located outdoors and powered by the kinetic force of a short waterfall from a running stream.
The Russian cannons of that war have been left, showing the direction of the attack in the stunning mountain scenery.
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