Pravets

Pravets owns one of the most improbable chapters in Bulgarian industrial history: in the 1980s this small mountain town produced the Pravets microcomputers — Bulgaria's Apple-compatible 8-bit machines that equipped classrooms and offices across the socialist world and made the country, for a moment, Eastern Europe's Silicon Valley. A whole generation of Bulgarian programmers wrote its first lines of code on a Pravets 82, and the town's museum keeps the beige keyboards as proudly as other towns keep medieval swords. The choice of location was no accident — Pravets was the birthplace of Todor Zhivkov, the state's long-serving leader, and enjoyed the attentions that such origins brought.

History reaches further back than the transistor: the town began as a clustered mountain village in the Balkan foothills, its monastery of St Theodor Tiron and its chitalishte carrying the usual Bulgarian continuities of faith and letters, and the surrounding villages keeping strong folk traditions.

Today Pravets has reinvented itself around water and leisure: the lake at the town's edge, ringed by a promenade, mirrors the hills; a golf course of championship standard spreads along the valley; and resort hotels host congresses and summer festivals. The lakeside stage carries the concert season into the open air — a town of computers and quiet water, an hour from Sofia and a world apart.