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2500 years ago in Bulgaria

2500 years ago in Bulgaria

December 2018 · 5 min read

I love road tripping around Bulgaria as there are so many intriguing places to visit - natural or historical, famous or secret ones. That time - 2 months ago, our destinations were two world famous places - Starosel Village and a museum in Panagurishte town.

We didn't have that much time to stop as often as I wanted to, but here is one of our sideways.

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A pomegranate tree in some village before Starosel. Not so common to see one in Bulgaria.

I was with a friend quite interested in history and that was the theme of our trip - history. I've shared before that my interest in history was close to 0, but that is slowly changing. It is hard to live in Bulgaria and not get interested in history at some point because the archeologists are finding quite interesting things all the time, provoking many questions. Our first spot was the valley of Starosel village that was a Thracian Cult Complex around V - IV century BC. Except the many Thracian sites in the area, there are also ancient Neolithic traces and some of the finds are from 5th-6th millennium BC.

The Thracian Cult complex consists of 6 underhill temples as well as a few royal burials. It was found in 2000 by the archeologist Georgi Kitov and one of the temples below Chetiniova mogila hill is the oldest royal Thracian Center with mausoleum found so far.

According to the archeologists the area around Starosel was a giant religious complex in ancient times. The hills above the temples - tumulus, in the area are arranged in a way that they repeat the outlines of the Great Bear constellation and and thousands of people were coming to walk on the holy road marked by them. The place is called by some archeologists "The Bulgarian Machu Picchu because of the similarities in the organization of the two ancient cities.

*A tumulus (plural tumuli) is a mound of earth and stones raised over a grave or graves. Tumuli are also known as barrows, burial mounds or kurgans, and may be found throughout much of the world. * Source - Wikipedia

Actually in the fields of Bulgaria these mysterious mounds - tumuli, are everywhere and in some of them were found tombs of ancient kings who left no other trace of their rule. They are more than 60,000 and only a thousand were explored.

For now two of these temples near Starosel are open for tourists - one of them built in Chetiniova mogila tumulus and the other in Horizont tumulus, although there are probably dozens other tumuli there, most of them are not researched enough, many of them were robbed by treasure-hunters. and for others there is just not enough money to turn them into a touristic place - we just have too many places like that that are waiting for restoration.

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That one in Chetiniova mogila is the biggest found Thracian temple on the Balkan Peninsula.

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It has a massive fence (kepis) around the whole hill with a length of 241 m and 3 m height. It was built from more than 4000 processed granite and greenish volcanic tuff blocks with weight between 200 and 500 kg. It is a mystery how they managed to transport them to the site. From the entrance starts a stairway that leads to a flat platform from where is the entrance firstly to one rectangular chamber and then to a unique circular room with a dome and diameter of 5.4m where different sacred rituals were performed. The Thracian had secret Orphic rituals, designed to improve and ascend the Thracian king-priest to anthropodemon (a status between human and divine nature).

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One of the hypothesis is that the temple was built by the Thracian king Sitalces, the third ruler of the Odrysian state /445-424 BC/, who was also possibly buried here in 424 BC.

Here is a map of the Thracian states from our next stop - the museum.

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There are 2 more stairways from the platform leading to a pathway that goes on that 3.5 high fence surrounding the hill. The circle that the fence outlines according to the Thracian religious believes symbolizes the sun. There were two lions statues at the entrance but they were stolen and in the excavations were found only 3 paws.
On the north side of the temple is dug an elliptical rock bath for production and storage of wine. When excavations were found inside vessels for wine drinking and strainers. Wine was an part of the ancient rituals along with different sacrifices.

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The door of the circular room.

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The entrance of the circular room.

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The Area Around the Temple

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30 m. south of the domed building, was found a "cenotaph" - an empty grave, and around it in three separate tanks - remnants of the human body and lot of gifts - gold ring craft, horse ammunition, weapons.

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At the foot of the Chetinyova mound complex is located the other tumulus - Horizont. This is the only discovered Thracian heroon which has columns - 10. The columns have capitals in early Doric style. In it was buried representative of the Thracian aristocracy, as evidenced by discovered gold and silver objects.

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***And me trying to feel the energy of the sacred area :) As you can see my shame of walking barefoot is already almost non-existent so I left my shoes in the car. ***

I will leave the museum for another post as this one will become way too long but here is what we wanted to see - gold treasures from around the same period as the tumulus - 400-300 BC.

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Thank you very much for reading!

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