Kaliakra

Kaliakra stretches into the Black Sea as a narrow headland, its steep cliffs rising above the water. Walls crossed the peninsula to protect a town known in antiquity as Tirisis. In the fourteenth century it became the capital of the principality of Carvun under rulers including Balik and Dobrotitsa. The fortified town had churches, baths and a princely residence, and its rulers struck coins of their own.

Dobrotitsa equipped galleys that fought on the Black Sea, but the principality fell to the Ottomans in 1393–1394. The Wallachian voivode Mircea briefly took the surrounding lands in 1402 before Ottoman troops returned. Kaliakra remained a port with a customs office. In 1791 another struggle played out offshore, when Admiral Fyodor Ushakov's Russian squadron defeated an Ottoman fleet near the cape.