Thracian tomb of Aleksandrovo

Worth a detour

A mechanical digger broke into this mound in December 2000 and exposed one of the best-preserved painted Thracian tombs anywhere: a frieze of horsemen and hunters, dogs, a boar at bay. The paint cannot take light or breath, so the chamber is sealed. What you walk into is a full-scale replica in the museum beside it, and the copy is exact enough to do the job.

Story

Background

The mound is called Roshava Chuka and sits at the edge of Aleksandrovo village, out on the plain between Haskovo and the eastern Rhodopes. On 17 December 2000 a digger working the mound cut into a corridor. Georgi Kitov excavated what it had found: a passage leading to a rectangular antechamber and then a round, domed burial chamber, built in the second half of the fourth century BC for someone wealthy enough to be painted into the afterlife.

The painting is what matters. A hunting frieze runs round the dome — riders, dogs, a boar, a hunter on foot with a double-headed axe — and a feast scene occupies the antechamber. Thracian art usually reaches us as metalwork; wall painting of this quality survives in only a handful of places, and it shows a people who left almost no written record of themselves doing the two things they apparently cared about most.

The original is closed and will stay closed. In 2009 a museum centre opened next to the mound, paid for with Japanese government funding, holding a replica built to the original dimensions with the paintings reproduced in place. It is a twenty-minute stop rather than an afternoon, and it is a long way from anywhere — most people fold it into a drive between Haskovo and the Rhodopes.