Photos: Tanya Grozdanova
The weekend will be here very soon, and this time we even have three days off. Is this not the best time to organize a trip to a nearby place and to sink for a moment in the tranquility and silence of the surrounding nature?
Last week the team of the only digital guide under your hills took you on a walk at three breathtaking places in the Rhodopes, and now the destination is a very picturesque Bulgarian village.
The village of Kosovo is located 5 km from Narechenski Bani along the Asenovgrad - Pamporovo road. It is surrounded by hills with virgin nature, and its neighborhoods are intersected by four perennial rivers. It was inhabited in the 17th century by settlers from StaroSelo to ByalaCherkva Monastery. The bloom of the village was towards the end of the 19th century, and most of the houses still in existence are from this period. The livelihood of the population was cattle-breeding, agriculture, and masonry. In the twentieth century, the village was neglected and completely forgotten, and nowadays according to official data there live about ten people.
The houses are in the typical Rhodopean Revival architecture and with their roofs of pavement seem to have come out of a fairy tale. Probably, if you don’t know what pastoral views and sense of harmony will welcome you here, you won’t come, but your visit won’t disappoint you. Climbing up near the walls of the other houses, you will feel as if you are walking under a green tunnel and on a soft carpet. On both sides of the road, you can find hundreds of fallen hazelnuts, and the locals and tourists have helpfully left pebbles every few steps so you can break them and eat some on the spot. And for dessert – there's nothing more delicious in the summer than wild hips, blackberries, raspberries, and blueberries.
Walking up leads us along abandoned homes, where nature has found its own place and lives its own life there under the old roofs that keep not one and two family stories. The atmosphere is somewhat ghostly, but at the same time so typical for most of the Bulgarian villages. Still, as if out of spite, the life is flowing here, and the grandmothers have already ordered beans for drying and preparing for the winter, sitting and having a sweet talk, most probably for the series on national TV.
The cultural life is focused in the Peaceful Life village pub, where you will be welcomed in a Rhodope way, hospitably and with a delicious kachamak that even the cat in front wouldn’t refuse. The only sights are the Ethnographic Museum, the Assumption of Virgin Mary temple and the memorial plaque for the perished in the wars in which Bulgaria participated. Unfortunately, there is no longer one to serve the first two, but if you want to check them out, the keys are in the pub.
The view from the hill on the slopes of which the houses have been dug up reveals to us the colors of the mountain flora and where the eye reaches there are ridges - as if at a distance apart, and in fact - separated by a deep gully. In the upper part, there is a complex with guest houses where you can stay and lose yourself in the Rhodope timeless.
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