Plovdiv Roman Stadium

Worth a detour

The curved end of a 240-metre stadium surfaces in the middle of Plovdiv's pedestrian street, a few metres below the shoppers, and you can look at that part for nothing from the square. The ticket buys the underground level: excavated seating close up, a reconstruction wall showing what the missing part looked like, and a short film. Worth it for the scale; skippable if you only wanted the photograph.

Story

Background

Hadrian's Philippopolis needed a stadium and built one to Greek proportions — roughly 240 metres long and 50 wide, with seating put by the excavators at up to thirty thousand. It ran along the natural saddle between two of the city's hills, which is exactly where the Ottoman and then the modern town laid its main street. So the stadium is still there, intact for most of its length, with a shopping street on top of it.

What is visible is the sfendona, the horseshoe end where the track turned. It sits in a sunken court at Dzhumaya Square, overlooked by a mosque on one side and cafés on the other, and you can see it free from the railings. Underneath, a visitor level takes you down among the marble seat blocks, with a panoramic wall carrying a reconstruction of the vanished two hundred metres seen from track level, and a small cinema running a film about the ancient city.

Fragments of the structure are marked further down the street where the rest of it lies, so the walk south becomes a sort of dotted line over a building you cannot see. The stadium was declared a national cultural value in 1995. It stays open on Mondays when most of the Old Town museums close, and it shuts for half an hour at lunchtime.