Sliven

Sliven lies pressed against the Blue Rocks — a wall of quartz-porphyry cliffs that really do turn blue in certain lights — and the mountain above it was for centuries the refuge of the haiduti, the outlaw-rebels of Bulgarian song. The city styles itself "the town of the hundred voyvodas": Hadzhi Dimitar, the most romantic of all rebel leaders, was born here, died at twenty-eight on a Balkan peak, and was made immortal by Botev's elegy — the one poem every Bulgarian knows — while his birth house is now a museum of that fighting century. Even the wind is heroic: the bora that funnels through the Sliven gap has its own name and reputation.

The same city, paradoxically, was the empire's industrial pioneer: in 1834 Dobri Zhelyazkov opened here the first textile factory in the Ottoman lands, founding an industry that clothed armies and earned Sliven its second title, the Bulgarian Manchester. Wool made the town; the surrounding vineyards — this is one of Bulgaria's great wine valleys — sweetened it.

Sliven's cultural claims are equally solid: the Sliven Symphony Orchestra, among the country's established provincial orchestras, performs in the concert hall by the theatre named for the town's classic author Stefan Kirov, and the art gallery holds first-rank Bulgarian painting, honouring Sliven-born masters like Dobri Dobrev. Rebels, weavers and violins — under blue rocks.