Шумен

The city under the Shumen plateau — Tumbul mosque, fortress and the monument of statehood.

The land of today's Shumen has been inhabited since ancient times — the earliest settlement in the area dates back to the Neolithic (second half of the 6th millennium BC) and was discovered near the village of Lovets. During Antiquity, the area was part of Thracian and later Roman lands, and fortifications were successively erected on the Shumen plateau, which were used in subsequent eras. The medieval Shumen Fortress, built on the remains of older structures, is an important administrative and military center of the Bulgarian state and plays a role in the defense of the nearby capital, Veliki Preslav. The first written mention of the settlement dates from 1153, when the Arab traveler Muhammad al-Idrisi recorded it under the name Simeonis. In the 14th century, the name Shumna/Shumen is already found, associated with the words "noise" and "noisy", since the city lies among dense forests at the foot of the plateau. After the Ottoman conquest, Shumen gradually became one of the most important garrison and commercial cities in Northern Bulgaria. In 1744, Grand Vizier Sherif Halil Pasha built the Tumbul Mosque — the largest functioning mosque in Bulgaria, a remarkable monument of Ottoman architecture with an imposing dome and a tall minaret. During the Renaissance, the Shumen grade school operated in the city, where Dobri Voinikov was a teacher, and among his students was the revolutionary Panayot Volov, a member of the Giurgiu Revolutionary Committee and a participant in the preparations for the April Uprising of 1876. The city was liberated during the Russo-Turkish War of 1878. According to data from the first official census of the Principality of Bulgaria in 1880, Shumen has 22,900 inhabitants and is the third largest city in the country after Ruse and Varna, surpassing even the newly elected capital Sofia. In the 20th century, the city established itself as an educational and cultural center of North-Eastern Bulgaria - the Shumen University "Bishop Konstantin Preslavski" is located here. On November 28, 1981, on the occasion of the 1300th anniversary of the establishment of the Bulgarian state, the monumental monument "Founders of the Bulgarian State" was opened on the Shumen Plateau with the figures of Khan Asparukh, Tervel, Krum, Omurtag, Boris I and Simeon I. Today, Shumen continues to be an important city in North-Eastern Bulgaria and a hub between Varna and the interior, preserving a rich heritage — from the nearby Madarski Konnik (UNESCO site) to the nature park "Shumensko Plateau" with caves and an observatory.