Belogradchik Rocks

Worth a detour

Thirty kilometres of weathered rock formations that people have been naming after horsemen and madonnas for centuries — and a fortress that simply used three of them as walls. Late afternoon turns the whole ridge orange; that is the hour to be standing on it. Check the closing time first — out of season the fortress gate shuts at five, with last entry an hour before.

Story

Background

The rocks are Triassic sandstone and conglomerate, stained red by iron, running for about thirty kilometres in a belt three to five kilometres wide and standing up to two hundred metres above the ground. Weathering has left them as stacks and pinnacles, and the local habit of naming them goes back a long way: the Madonna, the Horseman, the Schoolgirl, the Monks, the Bear, Adam and Eve.

The fortress is built into them, which is the part that makes the place unusual. The Romans put the first walls here in the first to third century AD, using an elliptical rock terrace as the base and letting the natural stone do most of the defensive work. Ivan Sratsimir extended it in the fourteenth century; the Ottomans rebuilt it properly between 1805 and 1837, bringing in French and then Italian military engineers, and the result is three courtyards, walls twelve metres high, and three hundred and sixty-five loopholes. In 1850 several thousand insurgents besieged it for ten days with about two hundred firearms between them, and lost.

The route through it is cobbled at first and then becomes a great deal of stairs, with the upper platform reached by steep metal ladders that are more exposed than most people expect. Admission includes a guided tour or an audio guide. Allow an hour and a half, and go up late — the rock does not do much at noon and everything at six.