Haskovo

Haskovo announces itself from afar: on a hill above the city stands a thirty-two-metre monument of the Virgin Mary with the infant Christ, listed by Guinness World Records as the tallest of its kind when unveiled in 2003 — a modern landmark for a city whose fortunes were built on far more worldly goods. For centuries this was tobacco country's capital: the fine Oriental leaf of the Rhodope foothills passed through Haskovo's warehouses to the world, and the merchants' mansions and public buildings of the early twentieth century still carry that golden-brown prosperity.

The city's site has been settled for millennia — Thracian mounds dot the surrounding hills, and nearby Uzundzhovo hosted one of the Ottoman Empire's greatest annual fairs, where its church, converted from a mosque, still tells the region's layered story in a single building. Today Haskovo is the confident centre of Bulgaria's deep south, a crossroads toward both Greek and Turkish borders, with a renewed pedestrian heart around its clock tower and squares.

Its concert hall bears the name of Nedyalka Simeonova, the violinist born here in 1901, who dazzled European stages between the wars — a fitting patroness for a city whose symphonic tradition, drama theatre and chitalishta maintain a full cultural season. Haskovo repays the traveller who looks south of the familiar routes.