Gabrovo

Gabrovo is the only city in the world with a House of Humour and Satire founded on the proposition that laughter is municipal property. The Gabrovonians earned their reputation as Bulgaria's champion misers — they cut off cats' tails, the jokes say, so the door closes faster and the heat stays in — and then performed the supreme act of thrift: they monetised the jokes themselves, hosting an international biennial of humorous art and a carnival that fills the streets each May.

Behind the wit stands industry. Stretched along the Yantra river gorge, nineteenth-century Gabrovo spun and wove its way to the title of "Bulgarian Manchester", its textile mills supplying half the Ottoman Empire. Wealth bred enlightenment: in 1835 the town opened the Aprilov School, the first modern secular Bulgarian school, funded by the merchant Vasil Aprilov — a founding act of the National Revival whose successor gymnasium still teaches.

Just outside town, the Etar open-air museum keeps the crafts economy alive in the most literal way: water-driven fulling mills, braid-makers and coppersmiths work before visitors' eyes in a reconstructed Revival lane. The city's concert life gathers around the Emanuil Manolov cultural house — named for the composer of the first Bulgarian opera — and the Gabrovo Chamber Orchestra, proof that a town famous for economy has never economised on culture.