Провадия

Provadia can make a claim that silences dinner tables: it may be the oldest town in Europe. At Provadia-Solnitsata, on the town's edge, archaeologists have uncovered a walled settlement of the fifth millennium BC — nearly seven thousand years old — whose inhabitants grew rich boiling brine from the great salt dome beneath the ground into salt cakes, prehistory's hardest currency. Massive stone walls, two-storey houses, and the graves of people buried with gold suggest a community defending real wealth; many scholars link Solnitsata's salt to the gold of the Varna necropolis, the world's oldest. The salt itself never ran out: Bulgaria's modern soda industry still draws on the same deposit, making Provadia perhaps the only place on earth mining the same resource for seven millennia.

Above the town, the plateau carries the fortress of Ovech, where Bulgarian tsars, Byzantines and Ottomans succeeded one another and where knights of the last crusade were imprisoned after Varna, 1444; a rock-cut spiral staircase and a long wooden bridge to the cliffs make the visit properly dramatic.

The town below, threaded along its river gorge, keeps a dignified provincial rhythm: the Aleko Konstantinov community hall anchors concerts, readings and ensembles. Salt, stone and patience — Provadia has been practising civilisation longer than almost anyone.