Shumen

Shumen lies on the northern edge of the Balkan range in northeastern Bulgaria, where a rocky hill above the town carries a fortress that Thracians, Romans and Bulgarians in turn walled and rebuilt. In the Second Bulgarian Empire it grew into a large fortified town of walls, towers and churches, taking over much of the role of the old capital Preslav nearby. It remained a Bulgarian stronghold until 1388, when Sultan Murad I forced it to surrender to the Ottomans.

After the failed crusade of King Władysław of Poland and Hungary in 1444, the old fortress was left in ruins and the town moved down to its present site below the hill. Under the name Şumnu it became a strongly garrisoned frontier town, settled by Turks, Jews, Tatars and Armenians; by the seventeenth century it had perhaps four or five thousand houses, against about eight hundred at the conquest. Russian armies attacked it unsuccessfully in 1774, 1810 and 1828, and the Ottomans called it Gazi, the victorious. The Tombul Mosque, completed in 1744, was built with a school and library.