BULGARIA
In summer 2021 I visited the Bulgarian Black Sea coast around the coastal town of Varna. It was a trip with a lot of varied experiences and a salutary rebuttal of all the prejudices I had about the former Eastern Bloc country generally and this specific tourist area in particular
Have you been to Sunny Beach? By Eric Schoon
When my 76-year-old and extremely youthful mother heard that I’d taken a trip to the Bulgarian Black Sea Coast, drunken parties and foam discos on Sunny Beach ware the first things that sprang to her mind. The association is not so surprising given the tabloid newspapers’ scandal-mongering headlines over the years about the wild parties young people have at Sunny Beach, and of course it is a golden opportunity for Bulgaria’s tourist authorities to work actively to restore the country’s reputation as a tourist destination. Let me right away: Bulgaria has much more to offer than cheap beer, massed ranks of sun loungers on wide sandy beaches and all-inclusive hotels with drunken teenagers and noisy families with children. In fact, my visit to Varna and its environs a couple of months ago became a succession of positive surprises and experiences that whetted my appetite for a possible follow-up in the near future.
FIRST-CLASS NATURE AND CULTURE
The coast around Varna consists of dramatic rugged shores with spectacular rock formations and captivating views from the top of the slopes. In many places you can find good sandy beaches at the foot of the cliffs and there is masses of
space – especially if you move away from the established beach resorts such as Golden Sands and Sunny Beach. If you have the opportunity to travel round in the landscape – for example in a hired car – you can experience a lot of nature nearby. Between the towns, the landscape is characterised by fertile farmland with enormous sunflower fields and vineyards. The sunflowers bloom in July and create an endless yellow inland sea – a captivating sight. But Bulgaria is also know for its production of aromatic oils such as rose oil and lavender oil, and exotic crops such as paprika and free range tomatoes are also cultivated in the fields, so the scenery on a road trip is hardly like that of midZealand. It is not so surprising that this fertile spot on the map has attracted people from near and far throughout history, and there are remains from these cultures everywhere. Roman baths, Greek temples, Thracian artefacts and lots of ancient churches erected by the early Christians who founded the Bulgarian Orthodox variant of the Catholic church. A dose of culture never did any harm and certainly not when the impressions gained alter your perception of the world. I was both surprised and a little wiser after a visit to Varna’s archaeological museum. It’s perhaps not a place that I would have sought out myself
but now, when I’ve been there, I would certainly not have missed out on the experience. The collection consists of artefacts from all periods of Bulgaria’s history, starting with hunter/gatherers in the Palaeolithic stone age 12,000-100,00 years ago. The unique thing about this collection is, however, the hundreds of grave finds from the bronze age. This finds are around 6,500 years old – 2,500 years older than the Cheops pyramid – and from a time when the population of Denmark was still in the old stone age. More than 300 graves from a hitherto-unknown culture were found and excavated on the outskirts of Varna in the beginning of the 1970s. The finds revealed a complex society, with a great divide between rich and poor. In the graves of high-status people they found hundreds of finely-wrought gold artefacts, bronze tools and beautifully produced and decorated ceramics. This is the oldest known wrought gold in the world and the discovery fundamentally altered the previous picture of the earliest known cultures. In the most spectacular grave a chieftain, high-priest or another sort of high-ranking leader was laid to rest. The most significant testimony to these people’s highly-developed state is, however, not the rich grave goods but the fact that the man was around 50 years old and a bit over 180 cm tall – not exactly the picture I had in my head of people from 6,500 years ago. continue on page 4