Bulgaria 2017 (Byala – Stara Zagora)

It was sad to leave Byala. The past few days were sunny. The Black sea calmed down after a storm; its waters became clear and inviting again and everyone in the city headed for the beach to use perhaps the last chance to have a swim this year. The weather changed overnight. It was drizzling this morning which made the parting with Byala easier. There will not be much to do in my retreat once the weather turns nasty. Only a few dozens of foreigners with permanent residence permits live in Byala in winter.

Today I have started a slow and long journey back to my home in Colorado. I will be traveling by buses and trains from Byala, Bulgaria to Munich from where I will fly to Denver. After many hours of pouring over maps and reading online resources I came up with a route that will take me through 5 countries. My goal is to visit interesting places, to write about them and to post these reports daily in my blog, subject to a reliable Internet connection. Let’s see how it goes. This is something that I have not done yet.

A morning bus took me to the city of Stara Zagora. Its name means “old city behind the mountain”.

A room at FOX Rooms Aparthotel was booked in advance. I chose this hotel because of its proximity to the bus station, reasonable rates and good reviews. The hotel did not disappoint.

The drizzle turned into a rain when I went to explore the city. Stara Zagora is not a popular tourist destination, but it has several historical buildings with Roman mosaics that I planned to see. The rain ruined everything. My windbreaker was supposed to be waterproof, but its seams leaked pretty soon. I hid from the elements in Sveti Nikolay Chudotvorets (St. Nicolas the Miracle-Maker) church.

It was cozy and quite inside. To ask God for better weather would be selfish and petty. I did not mention the weather to Him.

Back on the streets lined with chestnut trees the rain and strong wind threw ripe chestnuts at heads and backs of passersby.

The bad weather made me to give up the idea of seeing the Roman mosaics in Stara Zagora in favor of visiting something that I did not want to miss – the Neolithic dwellings, discovered in 1969 when the local hospital was replacing its underground water pipes.

It is a small museum inside the hospital complex that is basically just one room built over the digging. This dwelling is up to 8,000 years old. It was a 2-story building destroyed in a fire. Back then the dwelling was on the top of a hill. Now it is well below the street level. The archaeologists found a lot of pottery and animal bones, mostly pig, goat and sheep bones. The people escaped from the fire as no human bones were found. I probably was the only visitor today. The guide unlocked the room for me and gave me a free tour of the museum including the basement where they have an exhibition of the findings from other excavation sites in Stara Zagora. The pottery is so well proportioned and beautifully decorated that it is hard to believe how old it is.

Taking photos at the museum is prohibited. I bought some postcards to better remember this place and tried to photograph the postcard with the dwelling. Unfortunately its quality is not that good and the details are barely visible.

It was amazing to be at the place where people lived thousands of years ago.

On the following day I left Stara Zagora and headed deeper into the mountains.

Blagoevgrad