Smolyan

Smolyan stretches for ten kilometres along the Cherna river valley at over a thousand metres — Bulgaria's highest and longest town, assembled in the 1960s from three older settlements and cradled by the pine-dark heights of the central Rhodope. This is the mountain of Orpheus: legend places the first singer's birthplace in these ranges, and the Rhodope repays the myth with the most haunting music in Bulgaria — the slow, wide-breathed songs and the deep drone of the kaba gaida, the low-pitched bagpipe whose voice seems made of the mountain's own mist. A hundred-strong bagpipe ensemble from the region has filled concert halls worldwide; one Rhodope song, "Izlel e Delyo Haydutin", travels aboard the Voyager spacecraft as humanity's calling card.

The town beneath the peaks keeps a surprising urban dignity: the vast Rhodope Drama Theatre, the regional history museum with its superb folk-costume collection, an art gallery of national rank, and the largest planetarium in Bulgaria, pointing Rhodope skies — famously clear — at the universe.

All around lie the excursions that make the region beloved: the Smolyan Lakes beneath the cliffs, the Pamporovo ski resort, the karst wonders of the Trigrad and Yagodina gorges within easy reach. Smolyan is the Rhodope's capital in every sense — administrative, musical and mythological.