Philippopolis

In the midst of the vast fertile plain which stretches between the Balkans to the north and the Rhodope Mountains to the south, there rise up suddenly some half-dozen rocky crags along the banks of the river Maritza. By what freak of nature these isolated rocks emerged ages ago from the plain, or whether they are simply the summits of submerged mountains, I am not geologist enough even to surmise. But it is intelligible to any one why, in bygone days, the ground between these steep, turret-like hills should have been chosen as the site of a city. From the summits of any one of them you can scour the plain in every direction for miles and miles away. No enemy could advance against Philippopolis without his approach being discovered from the watch-towers on these hill-tops hours before his arrival.

Their sides are even now so precipitous, their ascent so steep, that it must have been easy to render them almost impregnable as fortresses in the days of bows and arrows and battering-rams, and even of the Macedonian phalanx. Tradition says that Philip the Great of Macedon was the original founder of the city ; and in as far as I can see, if there is no particular evidence that he was, there is even less reason why he should not have been. In any case, Phllippopolis is a very ancient city; and I have little doubt that antiquarians might find here traces of the various old-world dominions, which held sway in Eastern Europe long before Sclavs and Turks were ever heard of.

The Turks, however, had a marvellous facility for destroying the relics of antiquity ; and here, as in all other parts of Bulgaria, I can see few traces of any building dating back much, if at all, beyond the last century. Fires, too, are such incidents of daily life in these old Turkish towns, with their narrow, winding streets, and their wooden houses overhanging and overlapping each other at every angle, that the wonder is, not that the old buildings are not of greater age, but that they should have survived so long.