Balkan Mountains

Worth a detour

Five hundred and thirty kilometres of mountain running the full width of the country, from the Serbian border to a cliff over the Black Sea at Cape Emine. It is not somewhere you visit so much as somewhere you cross, repeatedly, and it decides the weather, the passes and the history on either side of it. If you want to meet it properly, drive a pass or walk a section of the ridge trail.

Story

Background

Stara Planina means old mountain, and the ancients called it Haemus; the peninsula took its later name from the Turkish word for mountain range applied to this one. It runs roughly west to east for some 530 kilometres across Bulgaria into Serbia, reaching 2,376 metres at Botev, and it divides the country physically and culturally — the Danube plain and its long cold winters to the north, the Thracian lowlands and the Rose Valley to the south.

That geography made it the line everything has been decided on. The passes — Shipka, Beklemeto, Vratnik, Zlatitsa — are where armies were stopped and where the road network still squeezes through. The forests were where the haiduti hid. The 1877 defence of Shipka, the 1876 rising in the villages below, the partisan groups of the 1940s: the same ridges, over and over.

For a visitor the range divides into usable pieces. The central section is the highest and the most protected, inside Central Balkan National Park. The western end around Vratsa and the Iskar gorge is limestone and caves. The eastern end flattens and runs out at the sea. Along the whole crest runs the Kom–Emine route, part of the European E3, which is the classic long Bulgarian walk and takes most people three to four weeks. Huts sit along it at roughly day intervals. You do not need to do all of it — a two-day stretch of ridge with a night in a hut is the cheapest way to understand the country's shape.