A Weekend in the New Coolest City in Europe
Bye Berlin. Forget Budapest. This small city has art and music on every corner.
Europe’s newest place to watch is also its oldest continuously habited city: Plovdiv, a city of 340 000 inhabitants in the South of Bulgaria. People have lived on this site since the 7th millennium BC. It has seen civilisations come and go: the Greeks, the Thracians, the Romans, the Ottomans, the Soviets. At the crossroads between Europe, the Balkans, and the Middle East, close to the borders of Turkey, Greece and Romania, Plovdiv is a fascinating city where cultures meet and melt, and layers of history sit atop of those that came before.
Today, it is as beautiful as it is unpretentious. A walk around the Old Town, where cobblestoned streets meander their way up a hill, will take you past imposing 19th-century mansions. These creaky, baroque-style houses were built during the National Revival period after the end of the Ottoman empire when Bulgarians sought to regain a sense of identity and national pride, and literature, architecture and art flourished. They have been wonderfully restored, and their overhanging upper storeys and bright paintwork…
