All the hills of Plovdiv once upon a time were much more impressive. However, the millennia of coexistence with man have left an indelible mark on them. Thousands of tons of rock have been removed from the hills and turned into the street flooring of the city or into building foundations. Then came the next conqueror of the city - a Macedonian, Roman, Bulgarian, Ottoman - and started to build the new face of his civilization - yet again with rock from the same hills.
A Soviet soldier of stone is standing on top of the mountain in snow and rainstorm. With saddened heart he remembers another storm - the leaden storm of the war, he remembers all those young men who fell in it. He mourns because unlike him, the well-known Alyosha, they remained nameless and unspoken about.
The Western traveller exclaims "in this city we saw the first clock in this vast and barbaric country!" However, do not get the wrong impression that Muslims did not know how to keep track of time, or were not interested in it.
The Kapana area is quite an extraordinary neighbourhood of Plovdiv. Inbetween any two streets there is space barely enough to fit a house or two. In Ottoman times it was the very centre of the city. The din of intensive trade started with sunrise and didn't cease until sunset: the calls of vendors, the rattling of carts, the strikes of hammers and speech in all languages of the East.
кадаифбалкан 
декември 2, 2009
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