Pazardzhik

Pazardzhik was born as a marketplace — the name says so — at the point where the road from Constantinople met the navigable Maritsa, and for centuries its fairs gathered rice from the surrounding paddies, iron from the mountains and cloth from three continents. The Ottoman-era prosperity left the town its most breathtaking interior: the Church of the Holy Mother of God, completed in 1837, holds a vast walnut iconostasis carved by the masters of the Debar school — a lacework of vines, birds and biblical scenes ranked among the supreme achievements of Bulgarian woodcarving, now under national protection.

The Revival gave the town painters and patriots: Stanislav Dospevski, European-trained portraitist of the awakening nation, worked here and his house is a museum; the writer and statesman Konstantin Velichkov, who translated Dante into Bulgarian, was born here and gave his name to the town's cultural pantheon. Their tradition continues in one of provincial Bulgaria's liveliest art scenes, anchored by a gallery rich in Bulgarian masters.

Music holds equal rank. The concert hall bears the name of Maestro Georgi Atanasov, the bandmaster-composer who became the true founder of Bulgarian national opera, and the Pazardzhik Symphony Orchestra — among the country's oldest provincial orchestras — plays a full season in it. A market town that learned to carve, paint and sing: Pazardzhik in one sentence.