Sliven

Sliven lies where the Stara Planina foothills open onto the plain of Zagore, below a rocky ridge with a medieval fortress. In the Second Bulgarian Empire, when Tsar Ivan Alexander ruled, it was a town on the Byzantine frontier ringed by twenty-four monasteries in the nearby hills. The Ottoman conquest destroyed the town and fortresses, and the monasteries were burned in 1388.

As Islimiye, the Ottomans made it the seat of a district from the early sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century its workshops turned out guns, pickaxes and iron tools, and a Jewish community grew; a traveller's notebook of 1668 singled the town out as a Jewish centre. The steep hills around it sheltered hajduk bands, and Sliven became known as the town of a hundred voivodes. Many of its men fought in the Greek rising of 1821 and the Serbian rising of 1804–13, among them Kondo Bimbashi, whose action helped take Belgrade fortress in 1806. After the Russo-Ottoman war of 1828–29 many people left, but in 1834 Dobri Zhelyazkov opened a cloth factory here, the first in Bulgaria.