16 September 2008 | After undergoing restoration and conservation works, an archaeological site dating to Late Antiquity will be officially opened on Wednesday near the village of Drenkovo in south-western Bulgaria, national media reported recently.

The site contains an almost perfectly square building, dating to the third to fourth centuries, which spreads on two-floors over an area of 900 square metres, according to information provided to BalkanTravelers.com by the Blagoevgrad municipality’s press office.

The building, which used to have a tile-covered roof, includes two large rectangular spaces, one square space with an entrance to a smaller rectangular space and an internal courtyard from which the inside areas were accessed. The building’s four outside corners are half-circular defence towers.

Large vessels for water, a wine-making contraption and holes for the preservation of grain found at the site are displayed at their original loaction, while other objects uncovered there – including ceramic and glass plates and bowls, as well as coins and iron keys, knives and hatchets can be viewed at the Regional Historical Museum of Blagoevgrad.

The site’s favourable location near the region’s two arteries – the Struma and the Vardar Rivers, which connected the Aegean region with the Danube lowlands and from there with Central Europe, made the area important during Antiquity.

While the building existed, it was twice affected by powerful fires. Experts noted that, while built in Late Antiquity, the building was used again during the Middle Ages, between the ninth and the eleventh centuries.

The project to restore, conserve and turn into a finished tourist product the archaeological site, located in close vicinity to Bulgaria’s border with Greece, was realised by the Blagoevgrad municipality under the PHARE trans-border cooperation programme between Greece and Bulgaria.

Out of its total worth of 256,199 euro, 90 per cent of the project’s financing was secured by a grant scheme that seeks to encourage the cultural, tourism and human resources of the trans-border region.

The project also foresees the development of a plan to manage, market and popularise the archaeological site as a tourism destination, as well as the training of the site’s tour guide and security personnel.

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