Varna

Varna keeps the oldest gold in the world. The necropolis discovered on its outskirts in 1972 yielded burials of the fifth millennium BC containing thousands of gold artefacts — a millennium older than Egypt's, the earliest known processed gold of humankind, displayed in the Archaeological Museum with the calm of a city long accustomed to superlatives. Greek Odessos, Roman Odessus with its vast thermal baths, medieval battlegrounds — including the fateful field of 1444, where the crusade of Władysław III ended and earned the young king his epithet Varnenchik — all lie within the modern city's fabric.

Bulgaria's sea capital wears its history with a holiday spirit: the Sea Garden, the country's grandest coastal park, runs for kilometres between the city and the beach, gathering the aquarium, the dolphinarium, the naval museum and the open-air theatre under its old trees.

Culturally Varna claims the national summer. The Varna Summer International Music Festival, founded in 1926, is Bulgaria's oldest festival; the International Ballet Competition, born here in 1964 as the first of its kind on earth, remains dance's most venerable proving ground; and the State Opera Varna and Varna Philharmonic sustain the season year-round, joined by the children's opera choir, the galleries and the Festival and Congress Centre's film weeks. Gold, ballet and sea air — Varna's formula has not aged in seven thousand years.