Beglik Tash

Worth a detour

Two circles of huge volcanic boulders on a wooded terrace above the sea, worked by Thracians from the thirteenth century BC: a marriage bed, an altar platform cut with pentagrams, a throne, a menhir with a footprint carved in it, cups and channels for collecting water, and a labyrinth. It costs about €2. Go early — the site faces east and there is no shade in the middle of the day.

Story

Background

The Škorpil brothers noted the rocks at the turn of the twentieth century, but the sanctuary was not properly investigated or opened to the public until 2002 and 2003. What the excavation showed was heavy human activity here from the end of the Bronze Age, in the thirteenth century BC, and use continuing into the Roman period; the cult was of fertility, the Mother Goddess and the immortalisation of the hero.

The Thracians worked with what the volcano had left them. The boulders are tuff, and almost nothing was moved: the ritual sites are natural forms with symbols cut into them, which is why the place feels less like a monument than like a landscape somebody has annotated. Water is the recurring element — basins, grooves and channels cut to collect rain and spring water for ritual washing. The individual stations have names: the marriage bed that gave the site its Turkish name, the sacrificial stones, the divine footsteps, the entrance to the dolmen that stands for the cave or womb of the goddess, the labyrinth, and a structure called the House of the Oracle dated to the fourth century AD.

It is about three kilometres from Primorsko on the plateau behind Maslen Nos, reached by road and then a maintained forest path. Eco-paths run west to the Vulchanovo Kale fortress and south-east towards the Maslen Nos fortress. Bulgarian sources disagree about the size of the complex and about whether the first excavation was 2002 or 2003; nobody disagrees about the rocks.