Bulgaria’s Veliko Tarnovo Cleans Up Illegal Dumpsite at Tsarevets Hill Fortress
A view of the location of the removed illegal dumpsite from the Baldwin’s Tower of the Tsarevets Hill Fortress in Bulgaria’s Veliko Tarnovo. Photo: Veliko Tarnovo Municipality
An illegal dumpsite located just meters away from the Tsarevets Hill Fortress, Bulgaria’s most popular cultural tourism site, has been cleaned up by Veliko Tarnovo Municipality, the municipal authorities have announced.The Tsarevets Hill Fortress was one of the two citadels, together with the Trapesitsa Hill Fortress, of medieval Tarnovgrad (today’s Veliko Tarnovo), the capital of the Second Bulgarian Empire (1185-1396).
The illegal dumpsite had been located on an area of 600 square meters right at the foot of the Tsarevets Hill, in what was the so called Frenkhisar, i.e. the supposed “Frankish Quarter” of medieval Tarnovgrad.
The location of the dumpsite has been right off the so called Baldwin’s Tower, which was the weakest point of the defense of the Tsarevets Hill citadel of Tarnovgrad.
The modern-day view of the Tsarevets Hill is the result of partial archaeological restorations carried out between 1930 and 1980.
Baldwin’s Tower is named after the Latin Emperor of Constantinople Baldwin of Flanders. After defeating the Crusader knights from the 3rd Crusade in the Battle of Adrianople in 1205 AD, the Bulgarian Tsar Kaloyan (ruled 1197-1207 AD) captured Baldwin of Flanders (Emperor Baldwin I of the Latin Empire), and kept him captive in the tower for several months, until Baldwin’s death. Baldwin’s Tower was restored in 1933 by Bulgarian archaeologist and architect Alexander Rashenov; because no-one knew what the original tower looked like, it was modeled after the surviving fortress tower in another medieval Bulgarian city, the Cherven Fortress.
This December 2015 photo shows the illegal dumpsite at the Baldwin’s Tower. Photo: Yantra Dnes daily
The clearned-up site of the illegal dumpsite. Photo: Veliko Tarnovo Municipality
The illegal dumpsite off the Baldwin’s Tower has a long history. The earliest reports about it date back to 2008; the site has been cleaned up several times by the authorities. The last time it reemerged was at the end of 2015.
“The piles of construction and other rubble were the deed of unconscientious citizens… Access to the location has been limited in order to prevent the emergence of new illegal dumpsites in the historic site,” Veliko Tarnovo Municipality has stated in a release.
It has urged the residents of the city to take their waste to the authorized dumpsite near the town of Ledenik, and has warned that the illegal dumping could bring fines of up to BGN 1,000 (app. EUR 500) for individuals and up to BGN 2,500 (app. EUR 1,250) for firms.
The Municipality itself reminds that the area of the Frenkhisar Quarter was where in 2014 the team of archaeologist Prof. Hitko Vatchev from the Veliko Tarnovo Regional Museum of History discovered the ruins of a medieval Bulgarian monastery dedicated to the Holy Mother of God (Virgin Mary).
In 2015, Vachev’s archaeological team expanded its digs there unearthing the monastery dining room, and then discovered the ruins of an Early Christian basilica, a discovery which may shed light on the existence of an unknown Byzantine city before Tarnovgrad.
While it had long been believed that the name of the Frankish Quarter of Tarnovgrad name stemmed from the fact that during the High and Late Middle Ages it was populated by Western European merchants trading in the Bulgarian capital Tarnovgrad, in 2010 Veliko Tarnovo archaeologist Evgeni Dermendzhiev carried out excavations there and found no evidence of Western European presence.
Instead, he discovered that in the High and Late Middle Ages the quarter was inhabited by Bulgarian craftsmen who specialized in metallurgy and especially in iron production.
A modern-day view of the restored Baldwin Tower of Tsarevets in Bulgaria’s Veliko Tarnovo. No-one knows what it looked like so this tower is a 1933 replica of a surviving fortress tower in the Cherven Fortress. Photo: Kandi, Wikipedia
A view of the excavation site of the Early Byzantine basilica and the 13th century Bulgarian monastery (in the front), with the Tsarevets Hill Fortress, including Baldwin’s Tower, in the background. According to the latest hypothesis, before becoming part of the capital of the Second Bulgarian Empire in the 12th-14th century, the Tsarevets Hill was the site of a major Byzantine city. Photo: BTA/Archaeological Team
A map of Tarnovgrad, capital of the Second Bulgarian Empire (1185-1396 AD), today’s Veliko Tarnovo, showing the location of Frenkhisar (the Frankish Quarter) in the southeast. Map: Martyr, Wikipedia
The Tsarevets Hill is one of two main fortified historic hills in the medieval city of Tarnovgrad, today’s Veliko Tarnovo, in Central Northern Bulgaria, the capital of the Second Bulgarian Empire between 1185 and 1396 AD. Together with the Trapesitsa Hill, Tsarevets was one of the two fortresses of the inner city acropolis of Tarnovgrad (Veliko Tarnovo). The Tsarevets Hill is a natural fortress on the left bank of the Yantra River, and is surrounded by it on all four sides with the exception of a small section to the southwest. It is located southeast of the Trapesitsa Hill. The Tsarevets Fortress had three gates, the main one being its southwestern gate. The name of Tsarevets stems from the word “tsar”, i.e. emperor.
The first settlement on the Tsarevets Hill in Bulgaria’s Veliko Tarnovo dates to the Late Chalcolithic (Aeneolithic, Copper Age), around 4,200 BC. The hill was also inhabited during the Bronze Age and Iron Age by the Ancient Thracians, and there have been hypothesis that it was the site of the legendary Ancient Thracian city Zikideva – even though a recent hypothesis claims that Zikideva was in fact located in the nearby fortress Rahovets. An Ancient Bulgar settlement was built on the Tsarevets Hill in the 9th century AD, during the First Bulgarian Empire (632/680-1018 AD) which later grew into a city. The Tsarevets Hill rose to prominence as the center of the Second Bulgarian Empire (1185-1396 AD) in 1187, after the successful Uprising of Asen and Petar, later Tsar Asen I (r. 1190-1195 AD) and Tsar Petar IV (r. 1185-1197), who ruled as co-emperors, against the Byzantine Empire in 1185-1186 AD.
Thus, the construction of the Tsarevets Hill Fortress began in the 12th century AD. The total length of the Tsarevets Hill fortress wall is 1,1 km, and it reaches a height of 10 meters (on top of the natural defenses of the hill’s slopes) and a width of 2.4-3.6 meters. The most vulnerable point of the Tsarevets fortification was the southeast section with its gate; however, it was protected by the so called Baldwin’s Tower because it is known that after defeating the Crusader knights from the 3rd Crusade in the Battle of Adrianople in 1205 AD, the Bulgarian Tsar Kaloyan captured the Latin Emperor of Constantinople Baldwin of Flanders, and kept him captive in the tower for several months, until Baldwin’s death. The Baldwin’s Tower was restored in 1933 by Bulgarian archaeologist and architect Alexander Rashenov; the restored Baldwin’s Tower was modeled after the surviving fortress tower in another medieval Bulgarian city, the Cherven Fortress.
The medieval church of the Bulgarian Patriarchate is located in the center of the Tsarevets Hill. It is called the Church of the Ascension of God, and was restored in 1981. The church was known as the “mother of all Bulgarian churches”, and was part of a complex with a territory of 2,400 square meters. Right next to it are the ruins of the imperial palace of the monarchs from the Second Bulgarian Empire which had a territory of almost 3,000 square meters. Both the imperial palace and the Patriarchate’s complex were surrounded by fortress walls and protected by towers. The archaeological excavations on the Tsarevets Hill have revealed the foundations of a total of 470 residences which housed the high-ranking Bulgarian aristocracy, 23 churches and 4 urban monasteries as well as a medieval inn. In the northern-most point of the Tsarevets Hill there is a high cliff cape known as the Cliff of Executions which in the 12th-14th century AD was used for executing traitors by throwing them into the canyon of the Yantra River.
For some 200 years the medieval Tarnovgrad, also known as Tsarevgrad Tarnov (i.e. the Tsar’s City), together with its fortresses Tsarevets, Trapesitsa, and Momina Krepost (“Maiden’s Fortress”), also known as Devingrad (“Virgins’ Town”), rivaled Constantinople as the most important city in this part of Europe, with some of the most glorious and famous Bulgarian Tsars – Tsar Asen (r. 1190-1195), Tsar Petar (r. 1185-1197), Tsar Kaloyan (r. 1197-1207), Tsar Ivan Asen II (r. 1218-1241), Tsar Konstantin Asen Tih (r. 1257-1277), Tsar Ivaylo (r. 1277-1280), Tsar Todor (Theodore) Svetoslav (r. 1300-1322), Tsar Ivan Alexander (r. 1331-1371), and Tsar Ivan Shishman (r. 1371-1395) – ruling their empire from Tsarevets.
Tsarevets and the rest of Tarnovgrad had a tragic fate, however, after in 1393 AD, after a three-month siege, it became the first European capital to fall prey to the invading Ottoman Turks. This was somewhat of a logical outcome after the de facto feudal disintegration of the Second Bulgarian Empire in the second half of the 14th century. After Bulgarian Tsar Ivan Alexander (r. 1331-1371 AD) lost his two eldest sons – Ivan in 1349 AD and Mihail in 1355 AD – in battles with the Ottoman Turks, he failed to prevent a number of Bulgarian feudal lords from seceding, and on top of that divided the remainder of the Bulgarian Tsardom between his two surviving sons. His third son Ivan Sratsimir (r. 1371-1396) received the smaller so called Vidin Tsardom, with the Danube city of Bdin (Vidin) as its capital, and his fourth son Ivan Shishman (r. 1371-1395) received the rest, the so called Tarnovo Tsardom, with the capital proper of Tarnovgrad (today’s Veliko Tarnovo). Just two decades later all Bulgarian lands, disunited and even warring among themselves, fell prey to the invading Ottoman Turks, ushering Bulgaria into five centuries of Ottoman Yoke (1396-1878/1912), and signifying a practically irreversible loss of its former great power status.
As the last ruler of Tarnovgrad, Tsar Ivan Shishman was not in the capital at the time it was besieged by the forces of Ottoman Sultan Bayezid I (r. 1389-1402 AD), its defense was led by the legendary Bulgarian Patriarch St. Euthymius (Evtimiy) of Tarnovo (ca. 1325-ca. 1402-1404 AD), the founder of the Tarnovo Literary School. After they conquered the Bulgarian capital on July 17, 1393, the Ottoman Turks slaughtered its population – an especially dramatic scene was the beheading of 110 captured Bulgarian aristocrats, and razed to the ground the Bulgarian imperial palace and the churches and monasteries of the Bulgarian Patriarchate. Tsarevets and Veliko Tarnovo were liberated from the Turks in the summer of 1877 in the Russian-Turkish War of 1877-1878 that restored the Bulgarian state.
The archaeological restoration of the Tsarevets Hill Fortress began in 1930 and was completed in 1981, the year that was celebrated, now somewhat questionably, as the 1300th anniversary since the founding of the Bulgarian state. Tourists visiting Tsarevets can view the so called “Sound and Light” audiovisual show, an attraction using lasers and music to tell the story of the medieval Bulgarian Empire as well as Bulgaria’s fight for freedom against the Ottoman Empire, and the story of Bulgaria’s National Liberation. It was first launched in 1985 for the 800th anniversary since the Uprising of Asen and Petar. The Tsarevets Fortress was granted a protected status by the Bulgarian government for the first time in 1927, and in 1964 it was declared a “monument of culture of national importance”.
