Plovdiv

Plovdiv has been a city for eight thousand years, which makes it the oldest continuously inhabited one in Europe, and it wears the centuries in layers: a Roman theatre for six thousand cut into the saddle between two of its hills and still staging opera; a Roman stadium under the main shopping street, its curved end showing through a glass floor; an Ottoman mosque of 1364 on the corner; and, on the three hills of the old Trimontium, the painted timber houses of the Bulgarian Revival, jettied out over the cobbles, that merchants built in the 1800s to show the world they had arrived. Below the hills, Kapana — 'the Trap' — was the craftsmen's quarter, then a slum, and is now the bars and studios that made Plovdiv a European Capital of Culture in 2019. The city's word for its own tempo is aylyak: the art of not hurrying.

The traveller climbs into the Old Town in the morning and lets the cobbles choose — the Balabanov house, the Hindliyan house with its rosewater fountain, the Ethnographic Museum in the finest of them all — and comes out at the theatre, where the seats are still marble and the view still the Rhodopes; walks the main street to the stadium and stands over the glass; loses the afternoon in Kapana; climbs Bunardzhik to the Alyosha, the Soviet soldier who is still up there, and Sahat Tepe to the clock tower, for the sunset over seven hills; and, with a day to spare, drives into the Rhodopes to the Bachkovo monastery, thirty kilometres south.

The Guide's honesty: Plovdiv is cheap, easy and unhurried, and its main risk is that two days become four — Sofia is ninety minutes by train and will still be there —; the Old Town's cobbles are steep and ankle-testing — flat shoes —; the theatre is open by day and better by night, when there is a performance and the price of a seat is the price of the view; Kapana's bars are lively and honest and close when the neighbours complain; the aylyak is real — lunch is long, service is calm, do not fight it; and August at noon on the hills is a furnace — take the Roman example and rest until four.