🇧🇬 Bulgaria · The centre (Plovdiv, Koprivshtitsa)
Plovdiv claims, with good reason, to be one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Europe: more than 8,000 years of unbroken history make it older than Rome, Athens or Constantinople. And the best part is that this immense past is alive and on show: a 1st-century Roman theatre that still hosts concerts, a Roman stadium under the pedestrian street, hills crowned by Thracian ruins and, above all, a dreamlike old town where colourful Bulgarian Revival houses climb the cobbled slopes. All of it made Plovdiv European Capital of Culture in 2019.
Bulgaria's second city is also one of its most pleasant and creative. Alongside the weight of history there is a young, artistic spirit centred on Kapana, 'the trap', a former artisans' quarter turned into a maze of little streets full of cafés, bars, galleries and street art. The long pedestrian street, one of the longest in Europe, invites you to stroll among buildings from every era, Roman ruins and terraces that are always busy.
This guide walks you through Plovdiv in practical terms: what to see in the old town and its house-museums, how to make the most of the Roman theatre and stadium, where to feel the city's creative pulse in Kapana, how to get there from Sofia, what things cost now that Bulgaria uses the euro, and how to escape to the Rose Valley or Bachkovo monastery. Ancient and young at the same time, Plovdiv wins over almost everyone who visits.
Plovdiv has more than 8,000 years of history. There were settlements on its hills from the Neolithic, and in antiquity it was an important Thracian city. In the 4th century BC, Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, conquered it and gave it the name Philippopolis. Later it was a prosperous Roman city called Trimontium ('three hills'), from which the splendid theatre, the stadium, the forum and villas with mosaics survive. Byzantines and Bulgarians fought over the city through the Middle Ages, and in the 14th century it fell under Ottoman rule, a period when it was called Filibe and from which mosques and baths remain. In the 18th and 19th centuries, during the Bulgarian National Revival, Plovdiv's wealthy merchants built the colourful old town houses that are its hallmark today. After Bulgaria's liberation in 1878, Plovdiv was briefly the capital of Eastern Rumelia before unification with Bulgaria in 1885. In 2019 it was European Capital of Culture. The full story is 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.
Read the history of The centre (Plovdiv, Koprivshtitsa) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Plovdiv plays in a league of its own: it is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Europe, and among the oldest in the world. Archaeologists have found traces of settlement on its hills going back to the Neolithic, more than 8,000 years ago, which makes it older than Rome, Athens, Carthage or Constantinople. On the hills scattered across the Thracian plain, beside the Maritsa river, people have lived, built and rebuilt with barely a break for millennia.
The original core formed on Nebet Tepe hill, where superimposed layers from different periods have been excavated, from the Neolithic and the Bronze Age onwards. In antiquity the city was an important centre of the Thracians, the great people who dominated much of present-day Bulgaria before the Greeks and Romans, famous for their horsemen, their warriors and their extraordinary gold work. The Thracian settlement was known by names such as Eumolpias.
This extreme antiquity is not a dead museum fact: in Plovdiv you can feel it. Every excavation in the centre brings new remains to light, and the different civilisations have left their strata one on top of another, so that the city is like a history book with thousands of years of pages laid over each other. That is why Plovdiv takes pride in its billing as 'the eternal city'.
A key moment in the city's history came in 342-341 BC, when Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, conquered the Thracian settlement and refounded it under his own name: Philippopolis ('the city of Philip'). It was one of many cities the ambitious Macedonian king founded or refounded as he expanded. The city, however, would return to Thracian hands and pass through various rulers in the centuries that followed.
The great splendour came with Rome. In the 1st century AD, Philippopolis was firmly absorbed into the Roman Empire and became one of the most important cities of the province of Thrace. The Romans called it Trimontium ('the three hills'), after the hills it sat on, and gave it everything a great imperial city needed: a magnificent theatre (late 1st century), a huge stadium for 30,000 spectators, forums, temples, baths, an odeon, aqueducts and villas with mosaics. Trimontium was a communications hub on the great Via Militaris linking central Europe with Constantinople.
Much of what astonishes visitors today comes from those Roman monuments: the theatre, which again hosts performances; the stadium, whose end pokes out beneath the pedestrian street; the remains of the forum and the villas. Roman Plovdiv was a rich and cosmopolitan city, and its mark is one of the greatest treasures of present-day Bulgaria.
After the Roman Empire split, Philippopolis remained in the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire, as an important city and stronghold on the Thracian frontier. Through the Middle Ages the city was fought over again and again between Byzantium and the Bulgarian Empire, which took shape from the 7th century onwards: it changed hands many times, was walled, besieged and rebuilt, and lived through episodes of the Crusades and of the medieval Balkan wars. The Bulgarians called it Paldin or Plovdiv, the name that would finally prevail.
In the 14th century the city fell to the Ottoman Empire, which would hold it for almost five centuries, until 1878. The Ottomans called it Filibe, and under their rule Plovdiv remained an important, prosperous and very cosmopolitan city, with a Bulgarian, Turkish, Greek, Armenian, Jewish and otherwise mixed population. From the Ottoman period there remain monuments such as the Dzhumaya Mosque (14th-15th century), one of the oldest in the Balkans, along with baths and elements of the street layout.
This long period left Plovdiv a cultural and religious diversity that still characterises it, with churches, mosques and synagogues. The city was a first-rank trading and craft centre on the route between Istanbul and central Europe, and that prosperity would set the stage for its great cultural flowering in the 19th century, by then within the Bulgarian national awakening.
The 19th century was Plovdiv's great century. Within the Bulgarian National Revival (Vazrazhdane), the cultural, economic and political awakening of the Bulgarian people under Ottoman rule, Plovdiv became one of the country's leading centres. Its prosperous merchants, enriched by trade (especially textiles and silk), built the splendid old town houses that are the city's hallmark today: large mansions in vivid colours, with jutting upper floors, rich painted decoration and luxurious interiors, a unique architectural style known as 'Plovdiv baroque'.
The city was also a hub of education, printing, the national church and Bulgarian revolutionary activity. Liberation came with the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878. But the Treaty of Berlin (1878) took a decision that affected Plovdiv in particular: instead of including it in the new Principality of Bulgaria, it made it the capital of an autonomous province under nominal Ottoman sovereignty, Eastern Rumelia. For a few years, Plovdiv was the capital of this semi-independent territory.
That situation did not last long. In 1885 a popular and military movement proclaimed in Plovdiv the unification of Eastern Rumelia with the Principality of Bulgaria, a fundamental milestone in the building of modern Bulgaria. The city, which had even been considered as a possible national capital, gave that role up to Sofia, but remained the country's second city and a great cultural and economic centre.
Through the 20th century, Plovdiv established itself as Bulgaria's second city and an important industrial, commercial (with its famous International Fair) and cultural centre. Like the rest of the country it lived through the Balkan wars, the two world wars and the decades of the communist regime (1944-1989), during which it grew and industrialised, though it also underwent urban upheaval. It was in the 1970s that, almost by chance, a landslide brought the Roman theatre to light, beginning the great recovery of the city's ancient heritage.
After the fall of communism and the democratic transition, Plovdiv bet more and more on its heritage and its culture as a driver. The old town was restored and revalued, the Roman ruins were excavated and turned into museums, and districts such as Kapana were revitalised as creative spaces. The recognition came to a head in 2019, when Plovdiv was European Capital of Culture, the first year a Bulgarian city held that title, which drove an enormous cultural and tourist renewal.
Today Plovdiv combines, as few cities do, the weight of a history more than eight thousand years long with a young, creative and welcoming spirit. Its streets hold a Roman theatre still in use, colourful Bulgarian Revival houses, an Ottoman mosque, churches, synagogues and the bustle of Kapana. In the European Bulgaria that adopted the euro in 2026, Plovdiv has become one of the country's best-loved destinations, an 'eternal city' that proves you can be extremely old and modern at the same time.