Monday 30th June 2008

The buses into the centre of Plovdiv left from a station within 200m of the campsite and were very frequent. We took one and got off at the Roman Forum, the start of a walking tour given in our guidebook. The remains of the Forum are scant with a giant post office and telecommunications building having been built in the centre and a major road running along the north side. Although the Roman level is well below the current city street level, remains of the Roman city in those areas must have been destroyed. Just north of the forum is the Roman Odeon that has been restored but very little is original. Our route then took us to the northern end of the Stadium, which is in a good state of preservation well below street level and is also on display in the basement of two shopping centres, although we were unable to find them. The nearby Drumaya Mosque look fantastic in the photographs but was closed for extensive renovations – it will be well worth a visit once the work has been completed. We climbed the hill of the old town, one of seven hills around which the city was built. Only six of these remain since the communists flattened one of them! On the top of the hill is the fortified Thracian settlement, subsequently occupied by the Romans and the fortifications changed and strengthened down to the Medieval period. The views from here are very good but dominated by the large number of high-rise blocks of flats that the communists were so keen to build. There are many beautiful Bulgarian Revival houses on the hill with their mixture of stone and wood construction with the upper floors jutting out over the ground floor. Being a Monday, the houses that are normally open to the public were closed and this also applied to the, apparently very good, Ethnographic Museum in huge House of Argir Kuyumdzhiouglu. We would have liked to have seen inside the house and seen the museum collection but it was not to be.
We had an excellent Bulgarian cuisine lunch in the shady vine-covered courtyard of a restaurant in the Old Town. Jane had Gyuvech (also known as 'hotch-potch'), a mixture of meat and vegetables cooked in an earthenware pot and I had 'Lamb in the Oven St. George's Way', lamb slowed cooked in the oven with rice and kidney. The lamb was very tasty and tender and the rice had adsorbed the flavour of the lamb, kidney and herbs – I must look for a recipe on the Internet.
We wandered back down the hill to the Internet Café that we had located thanks to the tourist information office. This turned out to be not as good as we had hoped (no wireless, not allowed to plug the laptop in, not allowed to use USB keys) but we were able to catch up on emails and it only cost about 20 pence for 50 minutes, so we can't really grumble. We then caught the bus back to the campsite from a bus stop very near the Internet Café.
We really liked Plovdiv, even though it is Bulgaria's second city, the centre is compact and has a pleasant feel to it. Definitely recommended.
Photos: The Plovdiv Roman Stadium and the statue of Philip of Macedon who conquered the city and renamed it Philipoupolis (Philip's City); The Drumaya Mosque currently being renovated; The Argir Kuyumdzhiouglu House; Driving in Plovdiv can be challenging – this van was delivering to a restaurant next to the Thracian settlement and the driver had to negotiate a way through the overhanging Bulgarian Revival houses.