Ye Olde Bucket List: Teliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria

I think Adam and I both agree that Veliko Tarnova, Bulgaria has been one of our best stops. Its a medium sized university town built on a ridge. From the highway you get the most magnificent picture but get splattered on the blacktop if you try to take it. The old town is built starting on top, working its way down a fairly steep slope. Drive through the tunnel and you can see the sheer dropoff that is the other side and the thick layer of solid stone that supports it. Its very picturesque, all those little houses with their red tile roofs tumbling down that hill.

There is a castle, Tsarvets. Every European town seems to have started inside one. They all are stone with outer walls that are several feet thick and have the usual warnings not to stand on them. There are slots through the walls through which the archers defended the castle. The crumbling walls of past dwellings and businesses are everywhere. As usual, a church is the dominant feature. This one has the most unusual frescoes, almost modernistic, grey-toned, and the altar seemed almost like a collage rather than the usual fantastic gold stuff. One very different feature of this castle is that some of its cornerstones are old Roman tablets of marble and they don't even have signs to call attention to them.

We took a guided walking through the oldest part oftown just below our hostel. The streets are more like narrow, cobbled alleyways. The houses seem tiny though some have more than one story on the lower side. Almost all have red tiled roofing, small enclosed yards full of vegetables and flowers, and traditional Romanian rugs hang with the clothes on the line. Some would call it quaint and it looks like like the dire poverty but our guide told us that this is how the real Bulgarians live and they are very proud of it. I can easily understand why.

We were also taken to the monuments of all the Bulgarian military and revolutionary heroes, all but one having been executed. A monument of warriors on horseback taught us that if the horse had two feet off the ground his rider died in battle, one foot and he died of his wounds, and if all feet were grounded, its rider lived. Interesting.