Roman Thermae in Varna

Worth a detour

Odessos built these baths in the middle of the second century and used them for about a hundred and fifty years. More than seven thousand square metres survive as brick and stone, with parts of the structure still standing some twenty metres up, on an ordinary street corner in central Varna. It is the largest Roman public building found anywhere in Bulgaria, and it is almost entirely unexplained.

Story

Background

Construction belongs to the reign of Antoninus Pius, and the water supply that fed the complex was in place by about 157. The sequence is the standard one — changing room, cold room, warm room, hot room, with the floors raised on brick piers so that hot air from the furnaces could run underneath — plus an exercise yard on the seaward side. At this size the baths were not only for washing; they were the town's meeting place.

They went out of use towards the end of the third century. The latest coins found here belong to the emperor Tacitus, who reigned in 275, after which Odessos pulled back behind a shorter wall and made do with smaller baths elsewhere. The ruin was quarried, buried and eventually built over.

Systematic excavation ran from 1959 to 1971 under Milko Mirchev of the Varna museum, which still runs the site. What you get today is a fenced block of standing masonry in the middle of a residential quarter, with a walkway through it, a couple of panels, and almost no crowd. Summer hours run to six in the evening; in winter the site closes on Sundays and Mondays.