Teteven

Ivan Vazov, the patriarch of Bulgarian letters and the country's most demanding traveller, gave Teteven the compliment against which the town has measured itself ever since: had he a second life, he wrote, he would spend it here. It is easy to see what moved him. Teteven lies in a deep emerald valley of the central Balkan range, the white teeth of the Petrahilya cliffs above, the young Vit river below, and forests on every side that turn the town's air into a tonic — Vazov called the place "a piece of paradise, fallen among the mountains."

The town repaid history's affections with courage: a prosperous crafts centre in the Revival — its embroidered folk costume is among Bulgaria's most beautiful — Teteven joined the revolutionary networks, and the surrounding heights sheltered rebels from Levski's committees to the end of Ottoman rule. The museum keeps that inheritance, together with a celebrated collection of local textiles and the memory of the old woodcarving and goat's-wool trades.

The chitalishte "Saglasie 1869" — "Concord", founded before the Liberation — remains the town's cultural hearth, with its ensembles, library and stage. Around it wait the excursions Vazov never exhausted: the cliff-hung Glozhene Monastery, the Saeva Dupka cave, the waterfalls and high meadows of the Balkan. Teteven's beauty needs no second life to be believed — one visit suffices.