Underpasses – yes I groan how a busy road bisects the old town. The cars get the right of way. And we the pedestrians are forced in the underpass. An underpass conjures up urban menace of urine stench and graffiti and dodgy characters.
Busy road through Old Town
The underpass under the road that cuts up the old town at Plovdiv is beautiful.
Attractive façade, ramps so you can push a cycle or buggy or wheelchair, and then shops, Roman paving of large slabs that they discovered when digging the subway, and a fine little museum of Roman mosaics and glass.
Roman slabs in underpass
Then onto the longest pedestrianized area in Europe, longer than Copenhagen. A busy, lively place, where you can stroll and shop and eat at cafes. Also nicely designed with ramps as well as steps.
A Roman stadium was dug up from an earlier level of the city. It is in excellent nick, being covered so long and pleasantly incorporated into the street, with a cafe on a mezzanine level and views from above.
Plovdiv is Europe’s City of Culture in 2019. It’s a lovely little city, with a mixture of architectural styles, highly walkable and a lively creative quarter. Keep the cars out, make the city live.
The National Revival style of architecture is very attractive. It was a bourgeois style of national self-assertion against the dominant Ottoman empire (400 years of Turkish occupation).
I'd never heard of Plovdiv until going for a few days to Bulgaria, chosen because the border is close to Thessaloniki. The delightful family hotel we stayed in showed two deeds of ownership - one from 1878 in Turkish script, the other a few years later in Cyrillic, after the liberation. The Turkish occupation weighs here, like Britain in Ireland.
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