A great way of getting the most out of any place you visit is to always make sure you do some kind of tour, and this doesn’t always have to mean you have to spend money. If you don’t mind doing a bit of walking there are a lot of free walking tours all around Europe relying purely on donations by participants at the end of the tour, pay what you think its worth or if your low on money don’t pay at all, just spread the word about them. We took part in one for Plovdiv, it was 2 and a half hours long, all the tour was in English (as it is in most places), and the guide was extremely friendly and helpful. To find out about where you can get these tours, meet up points and times, simply right in free walking tour and the name of the city you are staying in to your search engine. Here are a few of my favourite sites from the tour;
Something that really interested me was finding out that Plovdivs main street was actually built on top of an old Roman Collosseum, which turns out was actually a surprise to the people of Plovdiv aswell. It was unearthed while they was digging the foundations for a new building down the main street leading to a massive excavation to see how much more they could find. They managed to find a whole section at one of the ends of the collosseum, unfortunately they couldn’t go any further as it would of meant tearing down the whole main street where alot of big brand shops operate, above is a full scale model of what it would’ve looked like all those years ago.
We was lucky enough to come during the Martenitsa festival, a spring time festival where the locals adorn trees with red and white decorations also giving out red and white braclets to one another to signify the first day of spring. By hanging them on the trees it is hoped that the tree will be very fruitful this year, the decorations should come off on the first day where you see flowers start to bud and/or bloom, the bracelets should also be taken off at this time. Also if you look at the building below you can see an example of how the people of Plovdiv years back thought of ingenius ways to avoid paying extra taxes. Can you see how the buildings below have a larger 1st floor than their ground floor? This is because years ago when you built a house you paid an amount in tax for it for how much land you used up, not how large your house was, you can see examples of this all around the city.
During the tour you will be walked up to one of the 6 hills of Plovdiv, these are 6 hills that the city was build around and there are alot of storys associated with them, this hill has the remnants of an old fort built to help fortify the city, not much of it is left now but you can get some good views of the surrounding city from above it.
Plovdiv is also quite famous for its street art, I don’t mean graffiti as such although some of the graffiti we saw was actually quite good. There has been alot of commissioned street art throughout the city especially in old town, as a means of trying to bring in extra tourism. There old town is fairly new, not the buildings but the fact that it is once again occupied, once the communist reign over bulgaria ended all buildings were to go back to their original owners. Although their original owners were now dead and it took years for their descendants to decide which of them would get ownership of the buildings, leading to alot of the places to sit derelict for years.
What you have to make sure you see even if you dont take this tour is the Roman amphiteater, when it was excavited all the parts of it were found in pieces and over a signifiant amount of time were slowly worked out how they all fit together, like a massive version of a jigsaw puzzle! They even managed to find 1 statue completely intact, its said that every piece of it is all original rock from what it used to be, although I have a sneaking suspiction that the steps might be new.
