Sinite kamani

Worth a detour

A nature park of a little over 11,000 hectares rising straight off the back of Sliven, with a chairlift that lifts you nearly 600 metres to the Karandila meadows in about twenty minutes. Above are oak and beech forest, streams, caves and a set of named rock formations including Halkata, the Ring. Go late in the day: the colour the place is named for needs low light.

Story

Background

The Sliven mountain is the last substantial block of Stara Planina before the range drops towards the sea, and it ends in a wall of crags directly above the town. The park was declared in 1980 to protect them. The name means Blue Stones, and it is not marketing — the rock genuinely carries a grey-blue to violet cast, said to be the largest occurrence of its kind on the peninsula — but the colour depends entirely on the light. Early, late, or in haze it reads blue. At noon in July it does not.

The chairlift is the reason this is an easy half-day rather than a committing walk. It runs from the edge of Sliven up to Karandila, about 1,895 metres of cable and nearly 600 metres of ascent, and it puts you straight onto the open meadows at the top of the escarpment. From there marked trails fan out to Halkata, to the viewpoints along the rim, and down through beech and hornbeam into the gorges.

Sliven's other association is with the haiduti, the armed outlaws who operated in these mountains through the Ottoman centuries and who occupy a particular place in Bulgarian self-image — half bandit, half resistance. The town produced several of the best-known of them. The rocks were their ground, and the association is why local people speak about this hillside the way they do.