I know I have mentioned I live in a very small “city” (pop. 3,000) in central Bulgaria. I don’t know if I have mentioned that my town is famous (well, in Bulgaria) for its mineral hot springs. People come here from all over the country for hydrotherapy treatments.
Anyway, last week I heard that during Roman times, there was a bath here! Last night I asked our local history maven, the guy that runs the cultural center, about it. He told me it was discovered in 1943 and people wanted to excavate it, but then WW2 started and they had other priorities and now it’s just never been done. And then he added that it was built on top of an older Thracian site.
Where is all this stuff? In the town park. He promised to show me where it is today.
Reported you, you misbehaving cad, you. (Can “cad” be used for a woman?)
Europe is funny that way, you kick a squarish rock and someone from the local Historic Preservation Society goes all crazy on your ass because it’s from some broken building or other. Sorry! I didn’t mean to!
Sounds cool! Hope you had a good time with the local historian.
While you’re at it, get hold of some SCUBA gear and check out Seuthopolisaka Sevtopolis, a Thracian city dating back to at least 320 B.C. that is currently situated at the bottom of your local reservoir!
Here is a YouTube video showing plans to erect a coffer dam around Seuthopolis, pump the water out, and make it into a tourist-friendly UNESCO World Heritage Site. At 50 million Euros, it actually sounds to me like a pretty good bargain – as long as they don’t Disneyfy it too much. (This blog has artists’ impressions of what the reclaimed city would look like).
Nava, after the guy at the cultural center told me this, I got all excited and exclaimed that I’m going to dig up my yard now! Needless to say, everyone laughed and now they think I’m nuts. (Well, nuttier than they already thought I was.)
Antonius Block, I know alllll about that project. (You already know this, but for everyone else, this reservoir he’s referring to is right next to my town, in the neighboring municipality; I go by it all the time.) Personally, I think it’s completely insane. It would be cool and all, but a. Kazanluk doesn’t have 50 million euro, and b. if they DID have 50 million euro, there are about, uh, 50 million things that are, frankly, more important to spend it on. (Of course, this is a city that built a wall around its Roma quarter so that passersby would be spared the sight of “gypsies”. Their priorities kind of baffle me.) I just can’t believe they built a reservoir on an ancient Thracian city in the first place.
No, but one of the perks of a less-developed nation (such as Bulgaria) joining the EU is the possibility of getting development grants. Cultural heritage and development of tourist industry are, AFAIK, areas for which money has already been earmarked. 50 million Euro is a huge amount for the region, but a drop in the bucket for the EU. It boils down to a matter of convincing the Eurocrats that the money is best spent there.
Supposedly, they only found the site once the reservoir plans were well under way. Given the politics of the times, there probably wasn’t much that they could do to save the city. I wonder what shape it’s in now?
The first one is easy, EU structural funds Getting your Old Stuff UNESCOified is a Very Good Investment. There’s a Spanish politician, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, whose stint as a Minister of Tourism for Franco is mostly remembered as “when a nuke fell at the coast and Fraga took a bath to convince people the water was safe” (it doesn’t seem to have affected his health badly, he’s still chugging along), but during that same period he got our first UNESCO sites. I’m not sure about the current status, but a couple years back Spain had 27% of UNESCO sites - twenty-seven per cent! Most Spaniards expect Italy or France to have more sites than we do, or Greece. Those UNESCO sites get us a lot of the not-beach tourists, although some (like the gorgeous “Ciudad Encantada” in Cuenca) aren’t well-known even to Spaniards.
Getting that place set up can be a very good source of income for the region. The factory where I’m working right now is so large that it has an office from a local travel bureau; the Easter vacation posters include two circuits in Bulgaria, both of them “cultural tours.” Beach sites are easier to set up, but cultural stuff is better in the long term, among other things because it involves a bigger area.
For the second, the Spanish town of Tarragona came up with a law by which any archaeological finds must be preserved in situ and available to visitors. This has led to things like malls and a hospital where you suddenly see a big piece of metacrilate on the floor, there so you can see the mosaic underneath. The most recent reservoirs built in Spain have involved things like “moving the old church above the future water line”, but there are quite a few Romanic churches underwater. In Europe, if we stopped building where old stuff is we’d all have to turn into mountain goats or move to Australia.
I’ve been to Plovdiv a bunch of times! It’s only about an hour and a half away, and it’s the closest source of cheddar cheese and the occasional (outrageously expensive) avocado. But I’ve actually never been up to see the ampitheater, I’ve only seen it from below, going through the tunnel in the hillside it sits on.
My parents claim that they’re going to come visit in April. I figure we’ll go see all that stuff then.
Zebra, you’d think so, right? Bulgarian tourism authorities have not done a particularly great job of promoting the country’s archaeological wealth, though. The valley I live in is chock full of ancient Thracian sites, but you know how I found that out? An article in National Geographic in 2006. I had absolutely no idea, because no one ever talks about it, there’s no signage, and it’s impossible to visit any of these sights without a car. It’s just kind of…weird.
Yeah, but that’s how most of Spain felt about our own Old Stuff in 1965. Back then we were just getting our first waves of tourists; why anybody would want to come all the way from another country to look at the Acueducto de Segovia or at some funny-shaped rocks was beyond us. Partly because people who have grown with those things “right there” don’t value them. I have a feeling you value avocados a lot more now than when all you had to do was drive to the nearest supermarket - your neighbors are so used to “old thracian stuff” that the notion People Abroad don’t have bucketfuls of it all over the place is kind of inconceivable.
Getting your Old Stuff UNESCOified is a Very Good Investment. There’s a Spanish politician, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, whose stint as a Minister of Tourism for Franco is mostly remembered as “when a nuke fell at the coast and Fraga took a bath to convince people the water was safe” (it doesn’t seem to have affected his health badly, he’s still chugging along), but during that same period he got our first UNESCO sites. I’m not sure about the current status, but a couple years back Spain had 27% of UNESCO sites - twenty-seven per cent! Most Spaniards expect Italy or France to have more sites than we do, or Greece. Those UNESCO sites get us a lot of the not-beach tourists, although some (like the gorgeous “Ciudad Encantada” in Cuenca) aren’t well-known even to Spaniards.