Uprising!

Today the six of us piled into a rented car and followed in the footsteps of the April 1876 Bulgarian uprising, visiting Копривщица (Koprivshtitsa) which was the village in the hills where the enlightened young men of the time plotted and launched the first attempt to take most of what is now Bulgaria from the Turks. Its brutal repression fuelled the successful overthrow two years later. The village itself has many lovely old houses in a style I would call "grand rustic": small houses with low ceilings but fine internal decoration [see extra]. We then moved on to Карлово (Kàrlovo) the birthplace of the agitator Vasil Levski, whose hanging by the Ottoman rulers in 1873 motivated the 1876 uprising. We ended the day in Хисаря (Hisaria), a spa town with lots of Roman remains where we will spend the night.