Пазарджик

Pazardzhik — city of the carved iconostasis of the "Holy Mother of God" and the bank of the Maritsa River.

The lands around today's Pazardzhik have been inhabited since ancient times - numerous settlement mounds and traces of settlements from the Neolithic, Stone-Copper and Bronze Ages have been registered on the territory of the municipality, and during the Thracian era the area was densely populated, as evidenced by the numerous burial mounds along the Maritsa River. In the Middle Ages, the site of today's city was located along the old Roman and Byzantine road Via Militaris, which connected Central Europe with Constantinople, making it a natural stop for merchants and travelers between the Balkans and Asia Minor. Pazardzhik emerged as a settlement during the Ottoman period — it was first mentioned in Ottoman documents from December 1472 under the name "Pazar Yenikoy" (Tatar market), with about 105 Muslim households, and around 1485 it was officially founded as a way station guarded by settled Tatars, hence its later name Pazardzhik. In the 16th century, the city became the center of a separate administrative unit - kaaza, and in the 17th-18th centuries it developed as a port-warehouse on the Maritsa River for grain, rice, wine, timber from the Rhodope Mountains and iron from Samokov, transported down the river by rafts to Edirne and Constantinople. During the Renaissance, Pazardzhik became a spiritual center of Bulgaria. At the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, Bishop Dionysius of Agathoniki introduced the Bulgarian language into the liturgy along with Greek. In 1823, he opened the first Bulgarian school in the city, and in 1845, a secular school; in 1862, the community center "Videlina" was founded. In the period 1836–1837, the cathedral church "Assumption of the Virgin Mary" was erected with the famous wood-carved walnut iconostasis, made by Debar masters over a decade; part of the icons in the temple, among them the icon of St. St. Cyril and Methodius from 1860, are the work of the artist Stanislav Dospevski. The writer and public figure Konstantin Velichkov was born in the city on January 1, 1855. Russian troops liberated Tatar Pazardjik on January 14, 1878. By virtue of the Treaty of Berlin, the city remained within the boundaries of Eastern Rumelia until the Unification of Bulgaria in 1885. Its official name was shortened from Tatar Pazardjik to Pazardjik only in 1934. In the 20th century, the city developed as an industrial and commercial center of the Thracian lowland - with textile, canning and tobacco enterprises; its population peaked at 82,578 in 1992. Today, Pazardzhik is a regional town on the Trakia highway and the Sofia–Plovdiv–Burgas railway line, with a Regional History Museum founded in 1911 and Svoboda Park-Island along Maritsa.