Advertisement
Tuesday, 09 February 2010



Archaeologists Discover Nymph Sanctuary in Central Bulgaria



BalkanTravellers.com   

23 July 2009 | A sanctuary where the nymph cult used to be celebrated in Antiquity was recently found by archaeologists in the vicinity of the Nicopolis ad Istrum ancient site, located near the town of Veliko Tarnovo in central Bulgaria.

The experts discovered an alley, leading to a spring and covered with limestone tiles decorated in a stand-out relief.

The find is a first of its kind in the region, Pavlina Vladkova, leader of the archaeological team, told national media. Until now, she said, the only testament of the nymph cult in Nicopolis ad Istrum used to be images on coins made in the second century under the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus, as well as ancient inscriptions.

Vladkova expects that her team will find the remains of a cult building where the nymph worshippers stayed.

Nymph worshipping, according to the archaeologists, can be traced back to Ancient Greece, where the mythical female creatures were usually part of the retinue of a god, such as Zeus, Hera and Aphrodite.

Although, planned archaeological excavations are currently taking place at the nearby Nicopolis ad Istrum ancient site, as BalkanTravellers.com recently reported, the sancuary was discovered by chance. According to the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency, workers came upon the archaeological remains while installing a water pipe to the village of Resen, which called for the emergency excavations to begin.

Read more about Bulgaria on BalkanTravellers.com
Use BalkanTravellers.com's
tips to organize your trip to Bulgaria
 

Epicure


Bulgaria
Pumpkin head!

If you wish to insult somebody in Bulgarian, you could call him tikvenik – a word whose content isn’t quite clear, and which Bulgarians use to mean anything from ‘thickhead’ to ‘airhead’. The good thing about this kind of insult is that it expresses your definite lack of approval, Full Story



Curiosity Chest


Macedonia
Recycled Life: Bottle Collectors in Skopje, Macedonia

Like quicksand, poverty is hard to escape - the harder you fight, the worse it can get. In Skopje, some work hard scouring the city for "treasures." They are bottle collectors, spending the day in search of recyclable plastic which they can sell for a subsistence income.
Full Story






Music


Serbia
EXIT Festival in Novi Sad, Serbia: Overnight Exile in the Fortress

Located roughly in the middle between Bulgaria's Black Sea and Croatia’s Adriatic coasts, which are both shaken by high-energy rock parties each July, Novi Sad hosts one of the most significant summer festivals on the Balkans – EXIT. As fans from all parts of the region start to gather in the town for for this year’s event, scheduled to take place between July 10 and 13, Mila Popova recounts about the time she spent at the festival last summer.

Full Story