Bulgaria Discovery Guide

Bulgaria is the Balkans at their most complete: a country that gave the Slavic world its alphabet, kept a monastery of sixty monks running through five Ottoman centuries, and has the highest mountain in the whole peninsula. It has ten World Heritage Sites, 434 bird species, a Thracian tomb painted in the fourth century BC, a 1,300-year-old pine, and a city, Plovdiv, that has been inhabited since 6000 BC.

The main travel issue

Real: aggressive driving, skimmed ATMs, taxi overcharging and the Black Sea resorts' nightclub scams are all in the advisories, and the tourism portal, the toll agency and the surface-transport operator cannot be read by anything but a browser.

The solution

Skip Sunny Beach, ride the 80-cent metro to the Rila bus, and give the mountains and the small towns the week the coast usually gets.

If you travel slowly

Base in the south-west, where Rila and Pirin meet: Rila Monastery and its 8:30 opening before the coaches from Sofia, the Seven Rila Lakes between 2,100 and 2,500 metres, Musala at 2,925, and Bansko at 925 metres at the foot of Pirin on the narrow-gauge line from Septemvri. In winter the same base is the ski season.

If you want to see the essentials

Sofia for Serdica's Roman remains, the Alexander Nevsky cathedral and Boyana's 1259 frescoes on the edge of town; Plovdiv for the Roman theatre and the old town; Veliko Tarnovo for Tsarevets, the palace hill of the Second Empire; Kazanlak for the Thracian tomb's replica and, in May and June, the rose harvest of a valley that makes close to half the world's rose oil.

If you seek local character

The Cyrillic street signs, the kukeri masks and the martenitsa threads, tarator and banitsa and rakia, the Orthodox liturgy at Rila, and the Muslim villages that are a tenth of the country. Learn to read the alphabet before arriving; it changes everything.

If you want to go beyond the obvious

The north-west: the Belogradchik rocks up to 200 metres high with a fortress built among them, the Danube at Vidin, and the Madara Rider carved 23 metres up a cliff in the far north-east; Srebarna's pelicans on the Via Pontica flyway; and the Black Sea outside the resorts, Nesebar's peninsula excepted.

Bulgaria is a country whose sense of itself is older than most of Europe's states and whose institutions are younger than most of its visitors. The founding date is 681; the alphabet was developed at Preslav after the conversion of 864 and went from here to the rest of the Orthodox Slavic world; the church has been autocephalous since 927; and the Second Empire's capital at Tarnovo kept its palaces and patriarchate on Tsarevets until 1396. Then came nearly five centuries of Ottoman rule that ended only in 1878, after an uprising in which up to 30,000 people were killed, and a national revival whose monuments -- Rila Monastery rebuilt between 1834 and 1862 after a fire, the old town of Plovdiv -- are the country's most loved buildings.

The twentieth century added three lost wars, a monarchy abolished in 1946, forty-three years in the Soviet bloc, and the forced renaming of the Turkish minority that drove some 300,000 people to Turkey in 1989. Since the constitution of 1991 the country has joined NATO, the EU, Schengen and the euro, in that order, and remains two-thirds Orthodox, a tenth Muslim, and argumentative about all of it.

The manners are Balkan and direct: Cyrillic on everything, rakia before dinner, and an assumption that the visitor will make the effort with the alphabet. The advisories' warnings about taxis, nightclubs and skimmed ATMs are true of the resorts and the capital's tourist streets and not of the villages.

Bulgaria's nature is its best-kept asset and its most under-funded: three national parks, eleven nature parks and 565 protected areas conserve 434 bird species, a growing lynx population, brown bear, wolf and Balkan chamois in Pirin, and a Natura 2000 network covering a third of the country. The rules are the parks' and the advisories': stay on marked trails, carry insurance that covers mountain rescue and helicopter costs, take the tick warnings seriously between April and November, and keep away from the stray dogs, which carry rabies.

The coast is the country's environmental problem. The resorts built along the 378 kilometres of Black Sea shore are where the crime, the overcharging and the concrete are; Nesebar's World Heritage peninsula sits beside Sunny Beach's, and the bus between them is the one the advisory names for thefts. Spend the beach money in the small towns or on the mountains instead.

At Rila Monastery follow the monks' rules -- covered shoulders and knees, no photographs in the church or museum, no noise, no pets -- because it is a working monastery of sixty and not a museum with one attached. Pay the 12 euros for the museums; the money keeps the place standing.

January–February -- ski season at Bansko under Pirin and at Borovets; winter tyres mandatory and the Danubian Plain at a mean of −1 °C.

March–April -- the martenitsa threads of spring and the melt; the lower trails open, the high ones not; the rivers full and the flood season the advisory names.

May–June -- the rose harvest around Kazanlak, the best weeks for the towns, and the lower trails open while the high ones are still clearing; ticks active from April.

July–August -- the Black Sea season and the high mountains' walking window; Musala and the Seven Rila Lakes crowded at weekends; Rila's museums open to 19:30; wildfire risk from summer into early autumn.

September–October -- the best walking, the beech forests turning, the coast emptying and still warm into September; the harvest in the villages.

November–December -- fog in the plains, the first snow in the mountains and the ski season approaching; Sofia's museums and Plovdiv's old town without the coaches.

What a day costs, by how you travel

Year-round relative cost index vs country average

Higher — Sofia centre, Bansko in ski season, Sunny Beach in August

Average — Plovdiv, Varna, Veliko Tarnovo

Lower — the north-west, the Rhodope villages, the coast in shoulder season

Metro and monastery prices are the operators' own; vignette, tram and museum prices elsewhere are not stated because the pages that set them could not be read, and the relative bands are editorial judgment.