Adatepe

Worth a detour

People were digging gold out of this hill in the Late Bronze Age, three and a half thousand years ago, which as far as archaeologists know makes it the earliest hard-rock gold mine in Europe. Be clear about what a visit means, though: the hill is now a working open-pit mine run by a Canadian company, not a place you can walk. The archaeology is in the Krumovgrad exhibition and the Kardzhali museum.

Story

Background

Ada Tepe is a low hill, under five hundred metres, three kilometres south of Krumovgrad in the Eastern Rhodopes. The gold in it is locked in rock rather than lying in a river, and in the second half of the second millennium BC somebody worked out how to get it out — trenching, crushing and washing, on a scale the excavations were able to reconstruct in detail. That is contemporary with Mycenae and Troy, and it is the oldest evidence anywhere in Europe for mining gold from stone.

The archaeology happened because of the modern mine. Dundee Precious Metals' Krumovgrad project needed the hill, and the rescue excavation that preceded it was funded on a scale unusual for Bulgaria: settlement, workings, tools, all published and exhibited. First gold from the modern open pit was poured in March 2019, on a projected mine life of around eight years, inside a Natura 2000 area and under conditions still argued about locally.

So this is an entry about a place you cannot really go. The hill is an industrial site. What you can do is see the exhibition in Krumovgrad, which sets Bronze Age and modern mining side by side, and the finds held in the Krumovgrad and Kardzhali museums. There has been talk of handing the land to the municipality after closure and making something visitable of it; nothing about that is settled.