Clock Tower of Karnobat

Worth a detour

Bulgarian Revival clock towers are usually square and stone the whole way up. This one, built in 1875 by masons from Tryavna, starts square and turns into an octagonal prism halfway, with a timber-framed structure above the stone. Twenty-three and a half metres to the tip. It is free, it takes fifteen minutes, and it is a short walk from the museum.

Story

Background

The tower went up on the initiative of a Turkish notable of the town and was built by Tryavna craftsmen out of local stone. The square body is five point four five metres across on the outside and rises five point three metres before becoming an eight-sided prism; the stone reaches fourteen metres and the timber-framed superstructure adds six point seven, making twenty-three point four five metres with the roof and the spike. The door is on the north-east side and a wooden stair inside leads up to the clock mechanism. The bell arrived from Romania on the seventh of February 1875.

What makes it worth a stop is that it does not follow the pattern. The Bulgarian Revival clock tower is a recognisable type and this is a deliberate departure from it, which the town museum notes with some pride.

Karnobat itself is an ordinary inland town an hour west of Burgas, on the road and rail line to Sofia, and it does not detain most travellers. If you are stopping, the museum is the reason: founded in 1921 by the local gymnasium director and the second museum collection in south-eastern Bulgaria after Debelt's, it curates the clock tower, the Marceli fortress, the Jewish necropolis, the Sinanbey hamam and the Black Mosque. Its archaeological building opens by prior appointment on weekdays and its house museum on Dimitar Polyanov Street keeps ordinary weekday hours.