Bulgaria's smallest city — wine, sandstone pyramids, and one extraordinary church
Melnik is officially the smallest city in Bulgaria with fewer than 300 inhabitants, but it holds an improbable amount of history and wine within its sand-pyramid valley. The town sits in a ravine carved by wind and rain from the Melnik sandstone — a creamy, ochre-coloured rock that has eroded into extraordinary mushroom-shaped formations and towering pyramids that frame the vine-terraced hillsides. Melnik wine (a deeply coloured, tannin-rich red from the Shiroka Melnishka Loza grape, grown nowhere else) was reportedly Churchill's favourite wine; he ordered cases of it throughout World War II.…
Melnik was the capital of a short-lived medieval principality under the Bulgarian-Greek Despot Slav in the early 13th century, and at its peak was a significant trading town of 70,000 people on the Struma valley trade route between Constantinople and western Europe. Its decline — dramatic and almost total — came with the re-routing of trade routes and the displacement of Bulgarian population after the Greek-Bulgarian population exchanges of 1919. The town shrank from a regional capital to a village. The extraordinary Rojen Monastery, 7km into the hills above Melnik, was the spiritual centre o…