Afterwards we pick up the main road west to Kazanlak. This runs along the Tundzha river valley passing Strupets with its monastery, skirting the northernmost extremity of a lake caused by damming the river, and slipping between Gurkovo to the north and Nikolaevo to the south. A little over forty minutes after that we are in Kazanlak. We decide to go for a first exploratory walk into town, pass the cultural centre and wander vaguely off to the left, discovering a long-discarded cinema and the local market across from which stands a mosque. It is slowly getting dark and we explore a second-hand shop. The owner is deep in conversation with friends, all seated, all drinking tea, and as we go in I can see her face register ‘foreigners’ and the price tags in her eyes double and double again, the only time anything like that has happened on the trip. The street in which the shop is located has a short row of (closed) premises and it peters out in a double row of polychrome garages. We walk back in the general direction of the hotel and a restaurant that turns out to be part of the Museum of Ethnology. On the way we pass a block of flats with garages round the back. Parked along the side wall and in the courtyard in front of the garages are about a dozen Trabants, a wide palette of model variations from standard to estate versions, in various stages of repair and cannibalisation.

Before finally deciding on dinner we walk round a park situated on a mound not far from a hotel and visit a Thracian tomb or rather a replica…