VIBRANT COMMUNITIES

Мanufacturing building bricks and art hardly ever meet. But as you pass under the red clay arches leading to an assemblage of strange red and black creatures, deformed men and children, and labyrinths of bricks and broken moulds, you will find your disbelief suspended.

The premises are inconspicuous. You are in Cherven Bryag, a quiet industrial town of about 10,000 still reeling from the closure of its old industries, including a tank parts factory and the railway to Oryahovo on the Danube.

Picture this: barefoot men and women in traditional dress, dancing over glowing embers, their faces blank and inward-looking, while a drum and a bagpipe repeat a simple, hypnotic melody that seems to have no beginning and no end. The crowd around them is silent. The night sky above is thick with stars. The embers are very much alive.

There is a particular quality to the light in the Eastern Rhodope mountains. Low and lateral in the early morning, it makes the cliff faces reveal themselves slowly. The pale rocks catch it first, then the shadows deepen, and then – if you know where to look, or sometimes even if you do not – you begin to see the niches. Small, dark, precisely cut, they gape from the rock like absences, singly or in their hundreds, as purposeful as punctuation in a language nobody can read.

Londoners, especially, will be bemused to discover that decades before Norman Foster designed the world famous Gherkin in the City the workers in the oil refinery of Burgas got their own avant-garde housing project that in more than one way not only predated but also outshines one of Sir Norman's major achievements.

To appreciate the social, cultural and architectural significance of the Cucumber in Burgas, which now fervently aspires to become the European Capital of Culture in 2032, one needs to consider the historical background.

Few figures in European history have left a cultural footprint as deep and enduring as 9th century saints Cyril and Methodius. Revered as the Apostles of the Slavs, the two brothers from Salonica, the modern  Greek city of Thessaloniki, are remembered as missionaries, scholars, translators and creators of the first Slavic alphabet. Their legacy bridges cultures, languages and centuries.

The Black Sea has been a part of human history since the first Middle Eastern farmers crossed into Europe, about ten millennia ago. Its shores have been inhabited ever since. Empires fought major naval battles in its waters, ships sank, peoples came and went. Today, hundreds of thousands spend their summer holidays in its bustling resorts, enjoying its beaches. Still, the Black Sea remains an enigma.

The truth, as ever, lies somewhere between the postcard and the mud.

You know the image. A young woman in embroidered folk dress, cheeks bright in the early morning air, a serene, scented contentment on her face, picking pink roses from luxuriant bushes. She appears on magnets, soap packaging and tourist brochures from Vidin to Varna. She is Bulgaria's most recognisable export after yoghurt and the Cyrillic alphabet. And she is, in almost every meaningful aspect, fiction.

"Where is the parliament?" A few years ago anyone asking this question in Sofia would have been pointed to a butter-yellow neoclassical building at one end of the Yellow Brick Road. Imaginatively, it resembles the Paris Opera House and has the Belgian national motto, "Unity Makes Strength," above its main façade, looking onto the equestrian statue of a 19th century Russian tsar. This was the place where Bulgarian MPs used to gather to forge this country's laws and regulations.

For most of us, "writing" simply means the signs that record speech. We rarely stop to consider that writing is an independent system, with its own internal logic, structure and rules. In an European context, we automatically think of an alphabet – letters that represent sounds. In doing so, however, we tend to overlook other graphic systems: pictograms, symbolic signs and complex sets of images that also transmit information. Whether or not they contain phonetic value, all of these are forms of written communication.

Less than 20 miles from Plovdiv, near the village of Sitovo on the northern slopes of the Rhodope mountain range, a narrow patch of smoothed rock bears a set of "letters" that no one has ever deciphered. Two great stone cliffs rise from a rocky ledge to form a right angle. Above them, a pyramid-shaped rock sits like a roof over the whole structure. One of the natural pillars supporting it has a strikingly human-like shape. Locals call it the Keeper.

Once the homes of early humans, caves have always tickled the imagination. Their darkness, echoing caverns, hidden rivers, screeching bats and bizarre rock formations have become the setting of countless legends, stories and discoveries about times past. Bulgaria is no exception. This country's caves might not be the biggest or the most spectacular in the world, but many are very impressive and well worth a visit.

If you do not count (pun intended) the odd-number of lean dishes that Bulgarians gorge on Christmas Eve, you will be hard-pressed to distinguish their way of celebrating the Nativity from the rest of the globalised world. Easter is a different story, and it is not only because the dates of Eastern and Western Christians rarely overlap.

The Aleksandr Nevskiy cathedral and the Yellow Brick Road, the Largo and NDK: tourists in Sofia tend to gravitate around these focal points of interest. The more adventurous explore the multiethnic bustle around the Women's Market, and everyone is into discovering Sofia's restaurants and nightlife.

A former hotel, abandoned in the mountains and kept off limits by a group of mysterious guards. A former foreign minister stumbling upon the road that leads to it, and gets arrested. Rumours of something sinister hidden deep beneath it.

No, this is not the elevator pitch for a TV series based on the mysterious deaths of six people connected to a hut in Petrohan. This is the story of Object 17, which the hacks sometimes dub "Bulgaria's Area 51."

From the splendid images in the Bishop's Basilica in Plovdiv to the black-and-white portraits in Villa Armira, Bulgaria is proud of its ancient mosaics, which are mostly Roman. However, while a growing number of tourists discover these centuries-old gems, a universe of newer mosaics is slowly crumbling and going to seed before our eyes.

Steep rocky peaks, pristine alpine meadows, hidden lakes and some of the last communities that herd semi-wild, traditional breeds of sheep and horses: the Pirin is a small mountain that is one big wonder of nature. However, the sublime beauty of the mountain, whose highest parts have been a UNESCO-listed national park for over four decades, is not for those who would rather eschew hiking or stick to skiing in Bansko.

One doesn't expect to find waterfalls in the middle of the hilly Danube valley, and yet there they are – hidden amid karst crevices and familiar only to a handful of people, they turn up as a surprise.

The waterfall in the village of Hotnitsa is one of these serendipitous sights. In fact, it is one of the two reasons for the relative fame of this village in the Veliko Tarnovo region. The other is the colony of expats, mostly from the UK. According to most recent data, they own about a hundred of the 500 houses in the village.

The mastodons roamed along the banks of a river, munching on the vegetation under the canopy of a tropical forest, oblivious to the screams of  monkeys and the presence of rhinos, but watching out for lions and sabre-toothed tigers that were never far from the watering hole.

The river attracted all of these animals but, from time to time, a visit here could prove fatal. As the water swept away the remains of the dead bodies, they eventually started to pile up at one of the bends of the river. There the bones accumulated, along with other debris, and over time they fossilised.

If one of your New Year's resolutions is to travel more around Bulgaria in 2026, you have probably already encountered a problem: how to plan your trips so that you get the most out of this country's impressive nature, history and heritage. If you need inspiration, information or advice, the following pages offer a list of ideas for escapes and activities from January to December.

January: Bansko

Glass, one of the most amazing materials that humanity has discovered and mastered, starts with some inconspicuous sand. When heated to the right temperature and with the proper additives, it turns into a mesmerising molten lava that can take any type of shape – from window panes to vases to decorations.