Veliko Tarnovo

For two hundred years Veliko Tarnovo ruled an empire, and the city has never quite stopped behaving like a capital. Seat of the Second Bulgarian Tsardom from 1185 to 1393, medieval Tarnovgrad crowned its hills with palaces and churches, called itself the Third Rome, and fostered the Tarnovo schools of painting and literature whose refinement radiated across the Orthodox world. The fortress of Tsarevets — walls, towers, patriarchal cathedral high above the Yantra's loops — remains Bulgaria's most theatrical historic site, literally so: on festival nights the Sound and Light spectacle sets the entire hill ablaze with lasers, bells and choirs, retelling the empire's glory and fall.

The city that tumbles down the gorge below is scarcely less dramatic: tiers of nineteenth-century houses hang over the river, the work of the Revival's master-builder Kolyu Ficheto, whose churches, konak and inns are a personal museum spread across town. In that konak the Constituent Assembly wrote free Bulgaria's Tarnovo Constitution in 1879; in the Samovodska Charshia craftsmen still hammer copper and paint icons.

A university city of thirty thousand students keeps the tone young; the Konstantin Kisimov drama theatre, the Vasil Levski cultural palace, galleries and festivals fill the season — with Tsarevets itself serving, on great occasions, as the most imposing opera set in Bulgaria. Kings would approve.