Trains in this part of the world aren’t quite the same as Western Europe. Romania and Bulgaria still have trains but the infrastructure is still “in work” so they often have to go very slow. We don’t like long transportation days so we put in some shorter stops to break up the long train days. We added Veliko Tarnovo to our itinerary just for one of those breaks. After researching the small town, we realized that this place deserved a day or 2 of exploring so we booked 2 nights to see the sights. We are glad we made this decision.
Veliko Tarnovo has great historical importance for Bulgaria. It was the capital of the 2nd Bulgarian Empire in the middle ages. It also is a very beautiful town. It is set on hills surrounding a meandering river with lots of oxbows. There were views everywhere in town and reminded us of Delphi in Greece. Our hotel room (The Panorama Hotel) had a balcony where we spent a lot of time just watching over the river gorge. The town was a tourist town with some restaurants and art galleries but we are still offseason in May so we didn’t see many tourists. We still enjoyed walking around and seeing the old Bulgarian architecture.
The main attraction in Veliko Tarnovo is the hill with ruins of the Tsarevets fortress. It has the remains of a medieval castle, palace and cathedral that had pretty much been totally ruined by the end of the middle ages. They did a lot of rebuilding during the communist period in the 70’s and 80’s so you get an idea of how grand it must have been when it was the most important site in Bulgaria from the 1200’s to 1400’s. We climbed a tower that they put some medieval war stuff in. We saw the ruins of an old chapel that had a “skull rock” behind it to throw criminals and enemies off the cliff. A cathedral was rebuilt on the top of the hill during the communist era but it was decorated with Bulgarian war heroes instead of religious stuff because religion was frowned upon during those years. The whole site was on a hilltop so there were views everywhere of the big river elbows.
There were a few other small museums in town but we weren’t inspired to pay for any of them. We mostly just wandered around and took in the vibe of a small historic Bulgarian tourist town that didn’t have many tourists yet. No regrets. Next stop- the much bigger Bulgarian town of Plovdiv!
