Golyam Perelik (peak)

Worth a detour

At 2,191 metres this is the top of the Rhodopes, and the summit is occupied by a Bulgarian army installation with a barrier across the track. You can walk up to the barrier — about an hour from the Perelik hut — and that is as far as anyone gets. Walkers who want an actual summit in this part of the range go to Orpheus peak instead: lower, open, and with the better view of Perelik.

Story

Background

At 2,191 metres Perelik makes the Rhodopes the seventh highest of Bulgaria's mountain ranges. It stands on the main ridge that separates the Arda basin from the valleys of the Vacha and the Chepelarska, and it is not a shapely mountain. Like most Rhodope summits it is a broad forested dome rather than a peak; from the road below you would not pick it out of the line at all, and nothing about it announces that it is the highest thing for a hundred kilometres.

The top has been a military site for decades and is closed to the public. The walk from the Perelik hut takes about an hour and ends at a barrier across the track. People do it anyway, for the sake of having been, and the ridge itself is decent walking through spruce with occasional openings in the trees. It is a strange thing to have at the head of a mountain range — a summit that exists on the map and in the record books but not in anyone's photographs.

If what you want is a top to stand on, Orpheus peak nearby is the usual substitute: lower, unrestricted, and with a view that includes Perelik, which is arguably the better arrangement anyway.