Bistrishko Branishte

Worth a detour

On 22 May 2001 a windstorm flattened around seventy-five hectares of old spruce here. Bark beetle bred in the fallen timber, and by the end of 2004 most of the reserve's forest was dead — roughly six hundred hectares of grey standing trunks on the slope directly above Sofia. Nobody cleared it, on purpose. It is a strange and instructive thing to walk past.

Story

Background

The reserve was declared on 27 October 1934 by the same decree that created the park, and enlarged in 1980 to a little over eleven hundred hectares. It occupies the eastern flank of the mountain below the peaks of Golyam and Malak Rezen and Skoparnik, taking in the headwaters of the Bistrishka and Yanchevska rivers, from about 1,430 metres up to nearly 2,290. It is roughly four and a half kilometres long by three wide.

What it was protecting was primeval spruce: trees averaging a century or more, the oldest 140 to 150 years and up to a metre and a third across, canopy over twenty-five metres. UNESCO added it to the Man and the Biosphere network in 1977, and it was dropped from the programme in 2021.

The decision after the 2001 blowdown was to leave the timber where it fell — the reserve exists to let natural processes take their course, and clearing would have been the opposite of the point. The beetles did the rest. What you cross now is a long stretch of standing dead wood with young growth pushing up through it, which is regeneration on a scale you rarely get to watch. One other thing to look for from the city: the large snow patch below Golyam Rezen holds into July and sometimes August, and is visible from the streets of Sofia.