Mezek Fortress

Worth a detour

A Byzantine border fort of the late eleventh century on the Kaleto hill above Mezek, looking out over the Maritsa towards Greece and Turkey. Nine towers, some of them ten metres high, in walls banded with brick. The restoration has been heavy and divides opinion, but it leaves you a legible fortress rather than a heap of stone. The village's Thracian beehive tomb is the other half of the trip.

Story

Background

Mezek sits in the far south-east corner of Bulgaria, where the Maritsa runs towards the Greek and Turkish borders, and it has two monuments that have nothing to do with each other.

The fortress on Kaleto hill is Byzantine, built at the end of the eleventh century and usually attributed to the reign of Alexios I Komnenos. Its job was to watch the country between the Maritsa and the Arda. The enclosure is an irregular rectangle of roughly 110 by 60 metres, the walls of stone set in white mortar and decorated on the outside with three courses of brick, with nine towers — five of them along the southern side — surviving to as much as ten metres. Conservation work was done in 1973 and 2007, then a far more thorough restoration around 2013 that rebuilt walls and added a visitor centre and a recreated camp of tents below. Whether that helps or flattens the thing is a matter of taste.

On the edge of the village, in the Mal Tepe mound, is a Thracian beehive tomb of the fourth or third century BC, found by locals digging in 1931. Corridor and chambers together run to nearly thirty metres, which makes it one of the largest of its kind in the country. It is built stone rather than painted plaster, which is why, unlike Kazanlak or Aleksandrovo, you can go inside the real thing.