Prof. Nikolay Ovcharov

Prof. Ovcharov, only 4-5 years ago Perperikon was a shrine which even the local people did not know, there were no paths to it. Today it is promoted as a Bulgarian tourist product. What have you achieved after many years of hard excavation work?
We succeeded in drawing the chronology of Perperikon, i.e. to find out when cult activities originated there. It happened in the late Stone Copper Age, 7000 years ago. Around this time the hill, the rocks were divinified. The Thracians laid their gifts to the gods directly on the rocks, then they put them away in the seismic cracks that literally furrow the rock. This ritual continued throughout the Bronze Age. Different generations and Thracian cultures shaped the hill. First the large hall with the altar was made, which we believe is the temple of the god Dionysus. Then followed the palace of the Thracian king, the Acropolis. The palace functioned until the 14th century AD as an Episcopal center. Great quantities of gold were extracted in the vicinity. Only 2 km away from Perperikon are the gold mines outside the village of Streltsi, developed by the Thracians and exploited in the Middle Ages. An incredible attraction on which we still have a lot of work to do. The importance of the temple was related to the gold mines. Last year we completed the uncovering of a large center at its foot, from where the gold mining was controlled. It is no accident that it is called Vasilicate, a personal imperial estate, where the Emperor appointed his archon.

Because of the gold mines, in the 13th – 14th centuries Bulgaria and Byzantium waged wars for the control of Perperikon. Particularly interesting and significant is the war in 1343, when Tsar Ivan Alexander launched a special expedition to conquer it. He was victorious and appointed his archon, but after several months the Byzantines took Perperikon back. Twenty years later the temple and the whole of the Eastern Rhodopes passed into the hands of the Ottoman Turks. The Turks called Perperikon “the peak of the spirits”. Legends are told about it, about a mythical horseman who rode and where the feet of his horse stepped holes were made. The grandiose cuttings out were believed to be footmarks of the horse’s hoofs. Who was this horseman, a Thracian hero, the Christian St. George or Demir Baba…? Popular memory blends them all in one.

You say you have set yourself rather ambitious goals for the display of the monument this year?
Yes, I want the space between the beginning of the rock passage and the tower to be displayed so that one can move wholly on authentic levels - through streets, palaces, corridors. I am doing this for the purposes of tourism, because people want to see authentic things.