Plovdiv

Plovdiv spreads across the Thracian plain along the Maritsa, around a cluster of rocky hills on which Thracians, Romans and Byzantines in turn built their town of Philippopolis. In the fourteenth century it passed between Bulgarian and Byzantine rule several times, and was held by Bulgaria from 1344 to 1371. After the Ottoman victory at Chernomen in 1371 the Bulgarian garrison withdrew and the townspeople, led by their metropolitan, surrendered without a fight.

The Ottomans called it Filibe and made it a sultan's estate. In 1410, during the civil war among Bayezid's sons, Musa Çelebi took the town, tore down its walls and killed or deported many of its people. Rebuilt from the middle of the fifteenth century, it gained the Dzhumaya Mosque to the west of the three hills, a new bridge over the Maritsa, and the imaret that Shahabeddin Pasha founded beside it, around which grew the inns and bazaars of the main market district. Sephardic Jews settled in the sixteenth century, Armenians from Galicia in the seventeenth, and Greeks, Bulgarians, Armenians, Paulicians and Ragusan merchants all lived in town. By the eighteenth century Plovdiv had become the leading economic centre of the Balkan interior, famed for its coarse woollen cloth and other textiles; the Kardzhali bandits of the late 1700s did not reach it, but sent many refugees to it.