Перник

Pernik - the city of Krakra and home to the most spectacular cookery festival in the world.

The first traces of settlement in the region of today's Pernik date back to the Neolithic, around 6000 BC. In antiquity, the Thracian tribe Agriani lived here, and the medieval settlement later grew on the site of their capital Adeva. The strategic location in the Pernishka valley, by the Struma River and at the foot of the Vitosha, Golo Bardo and Lyulin mountains, makes it an important point on the roads between Sofia and Macedonia since ancient times. The Pernish fortress was built around 809, after Khan Krum annexed the lands around Sofia (Sredets) to the Bulgarian state; under the reign of his son Omurtag Khan, it became a border fortress. The most glorious page in its history is related to the voivode Krakra Perniški, who at the beginning of the 11th century ruled the area as an almost independent ruler. During the wars between King Samuel and the Byzantine Emperor Basil II, Krakra defended Pernik in two long sieges — in 1004 and in 1016, inflicting heavy losses on the enemy. Only after the death of Tsar Ivan Vladislav in 1018 did Krakra submit to Byzantium together with its 35 fortresses in order to protect the lives of the population. After the Ottoman conquest at the end of the 14th century, the fortress lost its military importance, but the surrounding population retained the status of soldiers with tax benefits. For centuries, Pernik remained a small settlement in the shadow of the nearby ore deposits, which would later determine its entire future fate. The first studies of coal deposits in the area were made as early as 1869 by the Austrian geologist Ferdinand von Hochstetter, and mining began in 1873. After the Liberation, Russian troops dug coal near the village of Moschino in 1878, and on August 17, 1891, systematic mining began with only 114 workers and an annual output of about 8,429 tons. It was coal that turned Pernik from a small village into one of the fastest growing cities in Bulgaria — its population jumped from 1,413 people in 1892 to 12,296 people in 1926. In 1893, the railway line to Sofia was opened, and in 1895, the first light bulb in Bulgaria was lit in Pernik. Pernik received official city status in 1929. During the socialist period, it became a symbol of heavy industry — a center of coal mining and metallurgy, with a large metallurgical plant. In the period 1949–1962, the city even bore the name "Dimitrovo" in honor of Georgi Dimitrov. After 1990, coal mining and metallurgy gradually declined, but Pernik remains an important administrative, transport and cultural center of Western Bulgaria, only 28 km southwest of Sofia. Today, the city is best known as the home of the Surva International Festival of Masquerade Games, the largest cooking festival in the Balkans, the root custom of which has been included in the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Representative List since 2015.