Kazanlak is the fragrant heart of Bulgaria. It is the capital of the Rose Valley, where every May acres of Damask roses burst into bloom and are distilled into the world's most prized rose oil. It is also the gateway to the Valley of the Thracian Kings, a plain dotted with burial mounds more than two thousand years old. Within a few kilometres you'll find the scent of roses, the frescoes of a World Heritage tomb and the gold of an ancient and mysterious people.
Its jewel is the Thracian Tomb of Kazanlak, from the 4th century BC. Its frescoed dome is one of the masterpieces of Hellenistic art in the Balkans. Because the original is so fragile, visitors see an exact replica a few metres away. Nearby, the Iskra History Museum holds the treasure of Seuthes III, the Thracian king whose tomb was found intact in the Goliama Kosmatka mound. The treasure includes his famous bronze head and a gold wreath.
This guide takes a practical look at Kazanlak. It covers which tombs and museums to see and what they cost, how the Rose Festival works and when to come for it, and where rose oil is distilled. It also explains how to get here by train or bus from Sofia and Plovdiv, and how to plan your visit to the Valley of the Thracian Kings. Thracian history and rose-growing tradition make Kazanlak unique in Europe.
More than two thousand years ago, the Kazanlak plain was one of the centres of Thracian power. This was the site of Seuthopolis, the capital that King Seuthes III founded in the late 4th century BC on the model of Hellenistic cities. Today it lies under the Koprinka reservoir. From that era come the great mounds of the Valley of the Thracian Kings. They include the Thracian Tomb of Kazanlak, with its frescoes, and the intact tomb of Seuthes III at Goliama Kosmatka. Under Ottoman rule, the area became famous for a different kind of wealth: the Damask rose. Brought from the East, it turned the valley into the world's biggest producer of rose oil. The Rose Festival has been held since the early 20th century. We tell the whole story, from the Thracian kings to the rose industry, on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The centre of the country holds Plovdiv, one of the oldest cities in the world, the Revival towns where the 1876 rebellion was born and the Rose Valley with its Thracian tombs.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before Kazanlak existed, the fertile plain between the Balkan Mountains and Sredna Gora was one of the hearts of the Thracian world. The Thracians were a group of Indo-European peoples who occupied much of present-day Bulgaria, northern Greece and European Turkey. They were fearsome warriors and extraordinary horsemen. They left no texts of their own, but they did leave a dazzling legacy of gold, silver and painted tombs that still amazes archaeologists today.
In the late 4th century BC, the city of Seuthopolis flourished in this area. King Seuthes III founded it around 320 BC. Seuthes was a powerful ruler of the Odrysians, the main Thracian tribal confederation, and he reigned in the turbulent period after the death of Alexander the Great, when the Macedonian generals were fighting over his empire. Seuthopolis was planned in the Hellenistic style, with walls, streets laid out on a grid, a palace-sanctuary and an agora. It was a modern capital for its time and shows how much Greek culture the Thracian kings had absorbed.
The city had a fairly short life before it was destroyed and abandoned. It was forgotten for centuries. Then in the 1950s, when the Koprinka reservoir was built on the Tundzha River to irrigate the valley, archaeologists brought it to light. Today Seuthopolis lies underwater in the reservoir, on the outskirts of Kazanlak, and an ambitious project to make it visitable again has been in the works for years. Its presence also explains why the plain is dotted with burial mounds: this was the sacred landscape of a royal dynasty.
Around Seuthopolis and Kazanlak, the plain holds dozens and dozens of burial mounds (mogili). These earth mounds cover stone tombs where the Thracian aristocracy was buried with their weapons, jewellery and horses. Because there are so many of them and they are so rich, archaeologists named the area the Valley of the Thracian Kings, a nod to Egypt's Valley of the Kings. It is one of the most important burial complexes of ancient Europe.
The most famous tomb is the Thracian Tomb of Kazanlak. It was found by chance in 1944, when some soldiers were digging a shelter. Under the mound was a small circular chamber with a dome, dating from the 4th or early 3rd century BC and covered entirely in frescoes. The main scene shows a funeral banquet. The seated dead man and his wife hold each other by the wrist in a gesture of farewell, while servants offer fruit and wine, and horses and charioteers appear around them. The quality of the drawing, the expressive faces and the delicate colours made it a masterpiece of Hellenistic art, and in 1979 UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site. The original frescoes are extremely fragile, so the real tomb stays closed. Visitors see an exact replica built a few metres away.
The other great discovery came in 2004. Archaeologist Georgi Kitov excavated the Goliama Kosmatka mound and found a king's tomb, almost untouched. The grave goods included a gold oak-leaf wreath, a helmet, silver vessels and weapons. Above all, there was a striking bronze head with a strikingly lifelike gaze. Together they made it possible to identify the dead man as Seuthes III, the founder of Seuthopolis. That head is now the emblem of the Iskra History Museum in Kazanlak and one of the most famous works of Thracian art.
Thracian power faded when Rome extended its rule over the Balkans. In the 1st century AD the region became part of the Roman Empire, within the province of Thrace, and roads, villas and small settlements appeared in the area. Later, when the empire split, the whole territory passed to Byzantium. From the 7th and 8th centuries onwards it was gradually absorbed into the young Bulgarian state, founded by Asparuh in 681. Throughout the Middle Ages the valley belonged to the two Bulgarian empires that followed one another, through ups and downs, wars and shifting borders with Byzantium.
At the end of the 14th century, the Ottoman conquest changed the fate of all of Bulgaria. The country came under the sultan's rule and stayed within the Ottoman Empire for almost five centuries, until 1878. That was when the town as we know it was born. The name Kazanlak is Turkish in origin and is usually linked to the word kazan, the copper cauldron or still, which is the very tool used to distil rose oil. The area filled with Bulgarian villages and Turkish communities, and under Ottoman rule the industry that would make it famous worldwide began to develop.
The rose that perfumes Kazanlak is not a local plant. The Damask rose (Rosa damascena), the variety used to make the oil, came from the Middle East. It was probably brought from Syria and Persia through the Ottoman Empire around the 17th century. The valley's climate turned out to be ideal for growing it, thanks to the shelter of the mountains, the morning humidity and the right soils. Rose fields soon spread across the whole plain, from the Kazanlak area to Karlovo.
Rose oil (rozovo maslo) became a luxury product sought after all over the world. It takes thousands of flowers to produce just a few grams of essence. The petals must be picked at dawn, before the sun evaporates their scent, and distilled the same day in copper stills. Gram for gram, its price came to exceed that of gold, and Bulgarian rose oil earned a reputation as the best in the world. Even today it is a key raw material for the great French perfumes. A whole culture of rose growers, distillers and merchants grew up around this industry, and Kazanlak became its undisputed capital.
Bulgaria was liberated in 1878 after the Russo-Turkish War. The war was largely decided at the nearby Shipka Pass, where Russians and Bulgarian volunteers heroically held off the Ottoman army. After liberation, rose production was modernised and turned towards export. In 1903 the first Rose Festival was held. Over time it became the town's most famous celebration, with its ritual harvest, its parade and the crowning of the Rose Queen.
The 20th century brought major changes. During the socialist period (1944-1989), Kazanlak was industrialised with arms and machinery factories, which brought people and jobs, while rose growing was organised into state cooperatives. The regime also promoted archaeology. In those decades many of the Thracian tombs were excavated and studied, and Seuthopolis was recovered from the water. After the fall of communism in 1989 and the difficult transition of the 1990s, the town shifted part of its economy towards cultural tourism and the rose-based cosmetics industry.
Today Kazanlak lives off three great heritages that make it unique in Europe. From the ground come the gold and the tombs of the Thracian kings, with the Kazanlak Tomb as a World Heritage Site and the treasure of Seuthes III in the Iskra Museum. From the fields comes the Damask rose and its oil, still exported to perfumers around the world and celebrated every spring at the Rose Festival. And from the mountains comes the memory of Shipka, a symbol of Bulgarian independence.
In May, the air in Kazanlak is heavy with the scent of roses and the royal burial mounds stand out on the plain. Walking through the town then lets you glimpse Thracian antiquity and a living tradition that has perfumed Europe for centuries, both at once. Few places pack so much into so little space. That is why Kazanlak is more than a town: it is the capital of a valley where history and perfume blend together.
