Devetashka cave

Worth a detour

The entrance is around thirty-five metres wide and thirty high, and forty metres in the hall opens to some 2,400 square metres with openings in the roof dropping shafts of light through it. Thirty-five thousand bats use the cave, and the females gather here in early summer to give birth, which is why the side galleries close from late May to the end of July. Nothing is laid on: a walk in from a car park, no lights, no handrails, no ticket.

Story

Background

Devetashka sits above the east bank of the Osam near Devetaki village, about fifteen kilometres north-east of Lovech. It runs 2,442 metres in total across more than twenty thousand square metres of floor, up to sixty metres high, splitting beyond the main hall into a wet branch with a stream and a dry, warm one. People lived here more or less continuously from the late Palaeolithic, and the chamber called the Altar produced some of the most interesting Neolithic material found in Bulgaria. Bird bones from the late Würm have yielded 136 species — over a third of the country's modern avifauna, and more than any other palaeo-ornithological site here.

Then the twentieth century got hold of it: state food reserve, then a classified military site, then in the 1950s a fuel depot whose tanks stood by the entrance into the 2000s. The road and rail bridges built to serve it were destroyed and the rails lifted from 2001, which is why the approach is now a footpath.

In 2011 The Expendables 2 filmed the large set pieces here, put a real bridge over the Osam and left it behind, and was fined for the disturbance; conservationists objected loudly and most of the bats returned the following year. Fifteen bat species use the cave, four of them globally threatened, and it is among the three most important hibernation refuges in Europe. Hence the closure every summer, which is not negotiable and is the right decision.