Last day in Bulgaria! (for now)
Today was an all day excursion to Veliko Tarnovo and Arbanassi, two towns/villages in Bulgaria. The drive to these locations took us through the Danube Plains, which is mostly farmland peppered here and there by villages.
Most of the harvesting has been finished for the year but crops of corn, maize, and sunflowers are still in the field. As for villages, not all villages are occupied as many villages in Bulgaria are dying. There are about 500 completely abandoned villages in the country! Several of the villages we passed definitely had life… folks drinking coffee at a café, donkeys roaming about, kids playing – but also had a lot of dilapidated/dying homes with broken windows, falling fences, and lots and lots of overgrown vegetation everywhere, etc. Maybe someone is interested in purchasing a village for a good price?!
Tarnovo is a town of about 45,000 people and is the former capital of Bulgaria prior to Sofia the current capital which is where the most people live (or intend to live). Everywhere in Tarnovo seems to be mostly built on a hill-side.
In the town waaaaay up on a hill is a beautiful fortress.
We were dropped off on a different hill (from where the picture above was taken). The walk was one heckuva walk. First part was downhill through town, literally walking through road/infrastructure construction. Many of the structures through there were the original buildings, just well maintained. Many had their dates on them, and we took a snap (below) of one showing it was built in the same general date / time-frame as the founding of our country.
Next was the flat-ish portion consisting of uneven stones/cobblestones leading up a causeway to the fortress entrance(s). The fortress had several tower gates on this causeway to hinder attack on the fortress, with the first being a drawbridge.
After entering the fortress there were mainly remnants of walls and buildings, with quite a bit of reconstruction (in the communist/soviet era).
We started a slow ascent to the top of the fortress where the masterpiece was (it was stressed multiple times that it was not a church… the soviets wouldn’t allow religious buildings to be built, rebuilt, or repaired). Did we mention slow? Due to more uneven cobblestones starting at a 5% grade with lots of steps that were missing stones to quickly make grade. Oh yea, did we mention it was really hot (mid 90’s) and we were dripping with sweat before we even got half way across the causeway!?
As we finally were making it to the “it’s not a church” chapel at the top, the views got more and more amazing. (We really don’t have the pictures to do the view justice, but here’s some of the “it’s not a church” as we approached it.)
(Yea, use that tiny person in a white shirt to get a reference on how high the wall was (once we’d already climbed to the top of the hill)… did we mention it was a lot of climbing?
The interior of the chapel / “it’s not a church” was painted by 6 artists in the 1990’s. In the gloom of the interior, the paintings felt nearly monochromatic/black and white, but definitely had splashes of a muted reds and tans here and there. They weren’t exactly a religious theme, though it kind of felt like it, but we believe were more about the trials and tribulations of their people. They were definitely quite haunting and sobering.
(Keep in mind, Tim’s got a really good camera that can really pull in any small amounts of light, so these pictures make it look brighter in there then it really was… it was quite gloomy and dark.)
After a loooong, hoooot trek back to where we started, we had lunch at a local hotel of pork kabobs and potatoes. Following lunch the bus picked us up to take us to Arbanassi, which is a quaint rock constructed building and outer fence community.
All of the rock construction is dry stack, without mortar. We were in this village to see their church, which was highly camouflaged. This is the church… just another stone building behind a stone fence.
From inside the fence:
And the front door is as far as we can show you, as no photos were allowed inside. Basically it is painted floor to ceiling (well, not the floor itself) with different religious motifs.
Following the church, they took us to the obligatory gift shop to try to get us to purchase some rose infused something… letting us try some alcohol and some candies. (This area is produces 70% of the rose oil used in the world for such things as perfumes, etc. As an aside, rose oil right now is over 11,000 euro’s per kilo, and it takes just over 7000 pounds of rose petals to create 1 kilo of rose oil.)
The last item on the agenda today, was across the street from the gift shop, and was a museum (basically it was a preserved house as they were lived in at that time). The stone bottom was where the wine cellar and stables were, and you went up stairs to get to the living quarters. The living quarters were in the Ottoman (or oriental) style, with no chairs or other western furniture, only sofa beds and sofa dining seating.
That was pretty much it for the day except for the bus ride across the rest of the Danube plain, to catch up with the boat.
Cheers,
Tim & Jay
