Veliko Tarnovo

The Yantra swings around the fortress hill in an almost complete circle, leaving a narrow neck of land as the only dry approach. For a medieval capital that is close to ideal: three sides defended by a gorge and a river, one side walled and gated. The citadel occupied the hill for roughly two centuries as the seat of the medieval Bulgarian state, and what survives is the circuit of walls, gate towers, foundations across the summit and a reconstructed church at the top. Walking it takes a couple of hours and the point is less the individual ruins than the position — from the walls the loop of the river is laid out below and the logic of the place becomes obvious.

The old town below the fortress is built on slopes steep enough that streets run in terraces and the houses step down the hillside, so that from across the gorge the town reads as tiers of roofs and balconies piled on one another. The main old street is a run of craft workshops — woodcarving, weaving, ceramics, coppersmiths — in nineteenth-century buildings, and it is a working street rather than a reconstruction. The university keeps the town young and its bars and cafés open outside the tourist season, which is unusual for a Bulgarian provincial town and is much of why the atmosphere holds up in November.

On the plateau above the town, a short drive up, sits a village of a completely different character: low, heavy stone houses built like small fortresses, with blank outer walls, iron-shuttered windows and enclosed courtyards, put up by prosperous merchant families in a period when wealth outside a walled town needed defending. Several are open to visit. The village's churches look like barns from outside and are painted floor to ceiling inside — the disguise was deliberate, since conspicuous church architecture was not permitted, and the contrast between the plain exterior and the interior is the whole experience.

The district and its neighbours hold a cluster of things that make a second night worthwhile: a preserved revival-era town of cobbled lanes and clock tower to the south, an open-air museum of working water-powered craft workshops, and the mountain pass on the range that divides north from south, with its memorial church visible for miles. The area is also the northern gateway to the central range, so this is where a trip that has been running along the plain can turn into a mountain day.