Veliko Tarnovo, located on the Yantra River, is one of the oldest settlements in Bulgaria. The first traces of human presence, dating from the 3rd millennium B.C.E., were discovered on Trapezitsa Hill, one of three hills on which the old town is situated.
Veliko Tarnovo was the capital of the Second Bulgarian Empire from the 12th to the 14th centuries. The palaces of the Bulgarian kings were located on Tsarevets Hill along with the Patriarchal cathedral.
In ancient times Tarnovo was a bustling town with Jewish, Armenian and Roman Catholic merchant quarters. The Ottomans captured it in 1393 after a 3 month siege, and three years later they overran the entire Bulgarian Empire. Since then many major uprisings against the Turks originated at Tarnovo. After nearly 5 centuries of Ottoman rule, there were uprisings in 1875 and 1876, followed by the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878) that ended with the liberation of Veliko Tarnovo. The 1878 Treaty of Berlin created a Principality of Bulgaria, and the following year a new Constitution was ratified and the capital shifted to Sofia.
We stayed overnight in Veliko Tarnovo and climbed the Hill of Tsarevts in the morning. The view was super and the cathedral was an artist’s delight. There were hardly any tourists around so we had the place to ourselves – more or less. To say that the fortress dominates the landscape would be an understatement. The first major fortress was built by the Byzantines between the 5th and 7th centuries and later rebuilt by the Slavs and the Bulgars. In the 12th century the Byzantines fortified it once again and it came to be known far and wide for its magnificence during the heyday of the Second Bulgarian Empire.
Tsarevets Hill has an aptly named ‘Execution Rock’ at the northern end of the fortress from which traitors used to be pushed to their deaths. The free fall into the Yantra River far below was invariably fatal. In the year 1300 Patriarch Joachim met this cruel fate at the hands of Tsar Theodore Svetoslav.
The royal palace no longer stands. Once upon a time 22 monarchs had ruled Bulgaria from the palace on the hill. In 1235 the Church of Ascension was built on the foundations of the palace. It was recently rebuilt and the walls plastered with colourful murals.
Trapezitsa Hill has a fortress too but we didn’t go there. The Archaeological Museum in Veliko Tarnovo houses the oldest piece of gold in the world, dating from 4100 B. C.E. but that wasn’t on our itinerary either.
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Varna - A playground on the Bulgarian Black Sea
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Nessebar - A Pearl on the Black Sea
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Sofia - Simply Super
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