Lake Varna

Worth a detour

Less a place to visit than a thing to understand. Varna's lake is the deepest liman on the coast, opened to the sea by a canal cut between 1906 and 1909 that turned it brackish within a few years, and it now works as the city's port. Its northern shore is where the gold necropolis was found in 1972. The view from the Asparuhov bridge is the one worth having.

Story

Background

About nineteen square kilometres of water and nineteen metres deep at most, Lake Varna is the largest by volume and the deepest of the Black Sea limans — a drowned river valley rather than a lake in the ordinary sense. Until the twentieth century a two-kilometre sand bar closed it off; it was fresh, and it was a good fishery. The canal of 1906–09 dropped the level by about 1.4 metres and let the sea in. A deeper channel followed in 1976, and the Asparuhov bridge was thrown across it.

A second canal runs west to Lake Beloslav so that ocean-going ships can reach the inland port. Varna East, Varna West, the timber port and the power station all sit on these banks. The bottom carries thick sulphurous mud, some of which is extracted as medicinal mud.

The reason it belongs in a guidebook at all is on the northern shore. In 1972 a cable trench there cut into the Chalcolithic necropolis whose gold now fills a room in the archaeological museum in town. Stand on the bridge with the cranes at one end and open sea at the other, and the logic of settling here six and a half thousand years ago is not hard to follow.