Koprinka Reservoir

Worth a detour

A large reservoir on the Tundzha just west of Kazanlak, pleasant enough for a swim and ringed with fish restaurants. Underneath it is Seuthopolis, the capital the Odrysian king Seuthes III built at the end of the fourth century BC — found during rescue digging for the dam, excavated, and then deliberately flooded. Come for an evening by the water and the knowledge of what is beneath it.

Story

Background

In 1948, with the dam already approved, archaeologists digging ahead of the flooding found something they were not expecting: a planned Hellenistic-period city with walls, a grid, a royal residence and a palace-sanctuary, built by Seuthes III as the seat of the Odrysian kingdom. It was the most complete Thracian urban site ever found in Bulgaria. Excavation continued for several years while the dam went up around it.

The decision that followed still gets argued about. The reservoir was needed and the government of the day was not going to redesign it, so the city was recorded, the moveable finds were lifted, and the rest went under. Seuthopolis now sits beneath roughly twenty metres of water. Periodically a story circulates that a drought has brought it back to the surface; it has not, and those reports have been checked and found false.

In 2005 the architect Zheko Tilev proposed building a circular dam around the site inside the reservoir, pumping it dry and opening it to visitors from a viewing ring — an idea costed at something like fifty million euro. It has attracted a lot of press and no construction. For now the reservoir is what it is: a wide sheet of water with the Balkan range behind it, good for swimming, and a place to stand and think about a capital city that was found and lost in the same decade. Kazanlak and the Thracian tombs are ten minutes away.