Vratsa

Vratsa stands in a doorway — the name means "little gate" — where the Vratsata gorge splits the Balkan's limestone wall with the highest cliffs in Bulgaria, four hundred sheer metres that climbers treat as a national shrine. Above the city, on Okolchitsa peak, a cross marks the spot where Hristo Botev — poet, revolutionary, the meteor of Bulgarian history — fell in June 1876, days after seizing an Austrian steamer to bring his rebel company across the Danube; every year on the second of June, sirens stop the whole of Bulgaria in his memory, and the pilgrimage to Okolchitsa starts from Vratsa.

The city's museum holds a treasure worthy of the setting: the Rogozen Treasure, one hundred and sixty-five silver vessels of the Thracian kings — the largest Thracian treasure ever found, ploughed up in a nearby village in 1985 — alongside the golden laurel wreath and silver greave from the Mogilanska mound in the city's own centre. Sofroniy of Vratsa, the Revival's first autobiographer, adds a literary halo.

Beneath the cliffs, the Ledenika cave glitters with ice formations; the Vrachanski Balkan Nature Park spreads its karst wilderness behind. The city season rests on the Vratsa Symphony Orchestra, the drama theatre and the chitalishte tradition — music at the foot of Bulgaria's most dramatic rock face.