Bulgaria's seaside city of Varna holds the world's oldest gold treasure
Graves unearthed in Varna in 1974 contained more than 3,000 gold objects dated to around 4600 to 4200 BC, the oldest large find of worked gold anywhere. The city built on top of them went on to be a Thracian village, a Greek colony, a Roman port and today Bulgaria's maritime capital.
The Chalcolithic cemetery gave its name to the Varna culture and is a landmark of world prehistory. Since its discovery, 294 burials have been excavated. Around the Varna lakes, which were freshwater until the 1900s, more than 30 prehistoric settlements have turned up, with the earliest artefacts reaching back roughly 100,000 years to the Middle Paleolithic.
Thracians lived around the bay from the late Bronze Age and traded by sea with Anatolia, Thessaly and the Caucasus. Greeks from Miletus founded Odessos on the site of an earlier Thracian settlement, most likely between 585 and 550 BC, and it came to lead the Pontic Pentapolis, a group of five Black Sea cities. Philip II besieged it without success in 339 BC, but it surrendered to Alexander the Great in 335 BC and later grew rich on Mediterranean trade. Scythians, Getae and, after 280 BC, Celts all left traces in the region, and the population was remarkably mixed yet generally tolerant.
Under Rome, Odessus joined the province of Moesia in 15 AD. Its great public baths, raised in the late 2nd century AD, are the largest Roman remains in Bulgaria and the fourth-largest known Roman baths in Europe, 100 metres wide and 25 metres high. Athletic games were held every five years.
The modern name appears in a chronicle describing how Asparukh, founder of the First Bulgarian Empire, chased a Byzantine army in 680 to 'the so-called Varna near Odyssos'. Its origin is uncertain: suggestions include a Scandinavian word for defence, an Indo-European root for water, and Slavic or Iranian words. By the time the Byzantines retook the area around 975 the name was so rooted they kept it. Today Varna is Bulgaria's third-largest city, home to the navy's headquarters, and was named seat of the Black Sea Euroregion in 2008.
Source: Varna, Bulgaria
