Plovdiv

Plovdiv likes to point out, gently, that it was already old when Rome was founded. Settled for roughly eight thousand years, it stands among Europe's oldest continuously inhabited cities: Thracian Eumolpias became Philip of Macedon's Philippopolis, Roman Trimontium — city of three hills — then a Byzantine, Bulgarian and Ottoman crossroads, each age building directly on the last. Nowhere is that continuity more theatrical than in the Ancient Theatre, the marble Roman house of ten thousand spectators rediscovered under a landslip in the 1970s and returned to duty: operas, symphonies and rock concerts now play where gladiatorial games once did, with the Rhodope foothills as backdrop.

Above it, the Old Town's Revival mansions — painted, curved, cantilevered — house museums and galleries; below, the Kapana quarter, "the Trap" of narrow artisan lanes, has become the liveliest creative district in the country, a transformation crowned when Plovdiv served as European Capital of Culture in 2019, the first Bulgarian city so honoured.

The musical season belongs to the Plovdiv Opera and the State Opera's Opera Open festival at the Ancient Theatre, to the Plovdiv Philharmonic, and to a festival calendar among Bulgaria's richest — from the January piano evenings to chamber music in the Balabanov House. Eight millennia of practice, it turns out, make an excellent host.