Ten days in Bulgaria: from a mountain monastery to the oldest gold ever made

The metro from the airport takes about twenty minutes into the middle of town. Drop your bag and walk three hundred metres, which in Sofia covers a working Ottoman mosque, one of the largest synagogues in Europe, a Catholic seat and an Orthodox church.

Nobody arranged that. The mosque went up in the 1560s to a design by Mimar Sinan, over one of the hot springs that made people settle here in the first place, and the ochre and red tiled building next to it was the mineral baths and is now the city museum.

The public taps outside still run hot water at around 40 C and people queue at them with five litre bottles all day.

Sofia's three most important churches were built roughly 1,500 years apart and stand about a kilometre from each other, which makes for an unusually satisfying morning.

The oldest is a round 4th century brick chapel in a sunken courtyard, reached through an archway between the presidency and a hotel, with frescoes in several layers inside. The second is the 6th century basilica that gave the city its name, put up in the same wave of building as Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, and with Roman tombs excavated underneath it.

The third is the one on every postcard: finished in the early 20th century in memory of the Russian soldiers who died pushing the Ottomans out, big enough for five thousand people, with the best icon collection in the country in the crypt.

Two hours south of Sofia, at over a thousand metres in a steep valley, is the building Bulgaria measures itself by. Rila grew up around the cell of a 10th century hermit and was rebuilt in the 1830s in bands of black and white stone, with the whole porch painted and mountains standing straight up behind it.

It matters here for more than looks. Through five centuries of Ottoman rule this is where the Bulgarian language, liturgy and manuscripts survived, which is why Bulgarians treat it as a national institution rather than a monument.

Leave early. The difference between arriving at ten and arriving at one is the difference between having the courtyard and sharing it with four coaches. If the weather holds, walk up to the hermit's cave afterwards.

The train takes two to three hours across the Thracian plain and the bus a steady two. Either way you are in Plovdiv for lunch.

The walk from the modern centre up into the old town climbs through about two thousand years in half a kilometre. Start where one curved end of a Roman stadium sits three metres below the pavement, its marble seating and the line the runners set off from both still there, then pass a 14th century mosque that is still in use.

Then climb. The theatre is near the top of the hill, cut into the slope so that the stage looks south towards the Rhodopes, and late afternoon is when the stone goes gold.

Half an hour south the plain stops and the mountains start, and the road up the valley has the two best things near Plovdiv on it.

Bachkovo was founded in 1083 by two Georgian brothers in Byzantine service and is the second largest monastery in the country. It is a working one: a painted refectory, an outdoor Last Judgement on the wall, and a queue of Bulgarians waiting to reach an icon reputed to be miraculous.

Asen's fortress is back down the road, a rock spur above the gorge with a 13th century church standing on the end of it. Buses to Asenovgrad leave the Rhodope bus station in Plovdiv frequently; from there it is a local hop or a cheap taxi.

Do two things this morning and then stop, because Plovdiv is the one city on this route that rewards sitting still.

The bishop's basilica took decades to excavate and finally received visitors in 2021, under a shelter that lets you walk on glass above two thousand square metres of late Roman floor mosaic. The birds are the part everybody photographs.

Then climb to one of the great revival houses, built in the 1840s by a merchant who wanted the whole street to know how the Anatolian wool trade had gone for him. After that, find a terrace.

This is the travel day: across the plain and through the pass in the Balkan range, six hours on a direct coach or nearer seven on the rails with a change at Karnobat.

Arrive, walk down to the sea and do nothing demanding. Varna reads easily: one domed cathedral at the top of town, one pedestrian street zigzagging down from it, and a park with the beach below it at the bottom.

At six in the evening in summer, everybody in Varna appears to be in that park.

In 1972 a digger operator laying cable outside Varna turned up a grave full of gold. What came out of the ground over the following seasons was a necropolis dug between roughly 4600 and 4200 BC, holding more worked gold than every other known site of that period put together.

It is five rooms in a quiet museum in the middle of town, and there is rarely a queue. What makes it extraordinary is not the quantity but what it implies: one grave was rich and the others were not, which is among the earliest evidence anywhere of a society with a top and a bottom.

In the afternoon go north, to a monastery hollowed out of a limestone cliff on two levels, its cells and chapel open to the air where the rock has fallen away. It sits in a small nature park and the woods are cool even in August.

For 27 years from 1913, this stretch of coast belonged to Romania, and Queen Marie, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, picked a hillside above the sea at Balchik to build something strange and lovely: a small palace with a minaret, ten villas down the slope, water channels and a chapel.

The garden outgrew the house. Sofia University runs it now as the largest botanical collection in the Balkans, with 250 species of cactus and a rose alley running down to the water.

Buses from Varna take about 50 minutes and run through the day, and Balchik itself, stacked white up a chalk cliff, is worth an hour on foot before the bus back.

One last hour before the airport, and it should be spent at the park gates. The naval museum covers rather more than the Bulgarian navy: Greek wreck finds, 19th century steamers, and a yard full of guns outside.

Bulgaria famously torpedoed an Ottoman cruiser with one small boat in 1912, and that boat is sitting in the yard.