Koprivshtitsa

On the twentieth of April 1876, a shot fired in Koprivshtitsa opened the April Uprising, and a letter written in the rebels' own blood carried the news across the mountains. Bulgaria's road to freedom runs through this small town in a high valley of the Sredna Gora — and Koprivshtitsa has kept faith with that moment by keeping itself: it is today an architectural reserve where more than three hundred Revival-era houses stand painted in deep blues, ochres and reds behind stone walls and heavy wooden gates, their carved ceilings and flowered eaves forming the most complete nineteenth-century townscape in the country.

The houses breed poets and rebels in equal measure. Koprivshtitsa was the birthplace of Georgi Benkovski, who led the uprising's flying detachment; of Todor Kableshkov, author of the Bloody Letter; of the writer Lyuben Karavelov; and of Dimcho Debelyanov, the tenderest elegist in Bulgarian poetry, whose house-museum with the statue of his waiting mother is a national place of pilgrimage.

Every five years the meadows above town host the National Festival of Bulgarian Folklore — inscribed by UNESCO on its Register of Good Safeguarding Practices — when thousands of singers, pipers and dancers from every region turn the hills into a living archive of Bulgarian music. Between festivals, the Old School and the chitalishte keep the town's voice warm.