On our way from Bansko to Istanbul we passed through the wonderful country side of Bulgaria. In old little villages with enormous history the people live together in communities maintaining their traditions and welcoming us with a friendliness we not yet experienced on our journey. You still see cows on the roads, no fences and we even saw three men with a rail mounted vehicle empowered by their human muscles going very easy going from one village to the other, like centuries ago.

Purchasing food is a spectacle in itself and when I started to cluck like a chicken all the people around me started to laugh, but the lady at least understood what I wanted to buy. The nice people, huddled in the mountain folds and eventually cause of the different colors to almost golden, autumn presented itself from its best side.

In Koprivshtitsa, which is very hard to pronounce for us, we stayed over night and walked around the neat village the day after. It was here in Koprivshtitsa that the first shot of the April uprising against the Ottoman occupation was fired during the Bulgarian National Revival period in 1876. In this historical awareness the habitants look after their houses and village and you may dive in and feel the history. At the weekly held market place they sell chicken, fresh vegetables and fruits and the people are just nice and honest which you hardly find any more on the planet. Another thing which we recognized was that the style of clothing among the young people is reduced to sports fashion which is not fitting to the beauty of Koprivshtitsa.

To really get into this region you should at least speak a bit Bulgarian and has lots of time to discover more from this wonderful part of the world. On the culinary side there was sadly not too much we could tell you about. Nevertheless the village and its nice habitants will ever last in our memories.
We went further to Istanbul and with our HYMER we crossed borders to Turkey.

Photos from Koprivshtitsa you find here and further photos about the Bulgarian country side you find in this photo gallery.