Казанлък

The capital of the Rose Valley — a city of Thracian kings, rose oil and holidays.

At the end of the IV century BC the Thracian king Sevtus III, ruler of the Odris kingdom, founded the city-residence of Sevtopolis at the foot of the Stara Planina - at the place where the "Koprinka" dam near Kazanlak is today. The Kazanlakh Tomb (IV century BC), discovered by chance on April 19, 1944, by soldiers digging a hiding place - a domed structure with unique frescoes, declared a UNESCO monument in 1979 - also dates from this era. In the wider area, later called the Valley of the Thracian Kings, dozens of mounds were discovered - Golyama Kosmatka (the tomb of Sevtus III), Golyama Arsenalka, Shushmanets, Helvetia, Griffoni and Ostrusha - evidence of the wealth of the Odris aristocracy. After the decline of the Thracian culture, the region passed successively under Roman and Byzantine rule, and in the Middle Ages it entered the borders of the Bulgarian state. The fertile valley between Stara Planina and Sredna Gora, surrounded by rose plantations, remained inhabited throughout the centuries, although there are no written records of a settlement on the site of today's city until the later period. After the Ottoman conquest at the end of the 14th century, the old settlement was destroyed, and the new Kazanlak was gradually born nearby in the following centuries under an Ottoman administrative unit - the belidiye. In the XVII-XVIII centuries, the city established itself as the center of rose production; in 1820, the first factory for rose oil was opened here, and over time, Kazanlak became a world center for the production of the famous Bulgarian rose oil. The city was liberated from Ottoman rule in 1878 — after the Russo-Turkish War of Liberation, initially under temporary Russian rule. The first municipal council was elected in 1880 with mayor Nikola Samev. In the decades that followed, Kazanlak built modern urban infrastructure—waterworks (completed 1920), fire tower (1906), schools, and community centers—and the rose oil and textile industries became the backbone of the local economy. In the 20th century, the population of Kazanlak grew rapidly - from settlers from neighboring villages and refugees from Odrinska Thrace and Macedonia after the Balkan Wars. In 1947, a municipal opera theater was established, and the Iskra Historical Museum, founded in 1901, gradually became one of the richest regional museum centers in Bulgaria; today its Rose Museum houses over 15,000 exhibits. During the years of socialism (1944-1989), the city experienced an industrial and demographic boom — from about 30,900 people in 1955 to over 58,000 in 1981, establishing itself as the center of mechanical engineering and electronics in Central Bulgaria. After 1989, the municipality switched to democratic local self-government, and the economy reoriented itself towards tourism, small entrepreneurship and continued rose production. Today, Kazanlak is best known for the annual Rose Festival (the last week of May and the first of June) and for the rich Thracian heritage of the Valley of the Roses and the Thracian Kings, attracting tourists from all over the world.