Plovdiv

Plovdiv is done on foot, in one full day or two easy ones. Everything worth seeing sits on a single hill and in the quarter below it, so the whole city is one long walk. It starts at the Roman stadium on the main square, climbs the cobbles to the theatre and the lookout, and ends down a flight of steps in Kapana.

The walk starts on Dzhumaya Square, right in the centre. A couple of metres below the pavement lies the curved end of a Roman stadium, and the rest of its stands are still buried under the buildings of the main street. You look at it over a railing, for free and at any hour. Next to it stands the Dzhumaya Mosque with its nine domes, one of the oldest Ottoman buildings in the Balkans. You can walk in between prayers.

From the square, Saborna Street heads uphill and the city changes house by house. The shop windows thin out, the tarmac gives way to big, uneven cobbles, and 19th-century merchants' houses start to appear over the street. Plots on the hill were small, so the upper floors are wider than the ground floor and lean out over the lane. The street keeps climbing until it passes through Hisar Kapia, a stone gate of the old fortress. Right beside the gate stands the Kuyumdzhiev House of 1847, blue, with a curved gable crowning its façade. People who have never been to Plovdiv know it from postcards, and today it holds the Ethnographic Museum.

Past the gate the house-museums begin. Walking through the Old Town is free, and you only pay once you step inside a house. Most of them close on Mondays, Hindliyan House included, whose owner had its rooms painted with the cities he had seen on his travels. Its story, and those of three more places that are easy to walk past, are on the page about the city's hidden corners.

On the far side of the hill the ground suddenly opens into a semicircle of marble rows. The Ancient Theatre was built at the end of the 1st century and lay buried for centuries, until it was dug out between 1968 and 1979. It stays open on Mondays, when the house-museums are closed, which makes it the natural start of the loop that day. In summer it stages opera in the evenings, and with a ticket for a performance you see it full, the way it was built to be seen.

The last climb is up to Nebet Tepe, the oldest part of the city. At the top are the remains of a fortress and a view over all of Plovdiv, entry is free, and the gate closes in the early evening. Steps down the hill lead straight into Kapana. The quarter's name means “the trap”, after lanes that meet at odd angles. Craftsmen worked here for centuries, and the streets still carry the names of their trades. Since the city's bid to be European Capital of Culture 2019, studios, bars and small taverns have moved into the old workshops. This is where the loop closes and where you sit down to dinner.

One day covers this loop. A second gives you time for Bunardzhik Hill and the Alyosha monument, for Tsar Simeon's Garden and a slow evening in Kapana. A third is for a day trip, to Bachkovo Monastery or Asen's Fortress, around half an hour out of town. Plovdiv itself is almost always reached through Sofia airport, by metro into the centre and then by train, about 3 h total in all. After that, city transport (€0.50) is only needed to and from the station.