Eἰς Tὴν Πόλιν

Before I begin, if you are interested in the kinds of cuisine I experienced here in Bulgaria, click here. I had each of those at least once during my stay. Most of the cuisine revolves around cucumber, tomato, and some type of meat.


Since we had to excavate on Saturday morning, most of the crew stayed in Friday night. Three of us decided to at least stay up until midnight.

We ended up on the beach, looking out on the Black Sea, enjoying a bottle of fine Bulgarian wine. What more could one want? And yes, it is legal to drink on the beaches here.

As you can imagine, Saturday morning was... interesting. It was a little difficult to work at first, but after the first ten minutes of sweating profusely in the stagnant climate things became more manageable.

Truth be told, the manual labor has been a kind of a nostrum. I have not needed to drink a single cup of coffee here. The only exception is when I spent a day doing to-scale drawings of a wall. That is understandable. But for the most part, hoisting and sinking the pickaxe into the earth has essentially been my cup of coffee.

After a day of working in P8, it became deeper and deeper as the morning wore on. The soil became a lot easier to work with so our progress skyrocketed. Also, due to the exciting finds from the previous day, the leaders of the excavation team wanted us to continue down. Mostly as a precaution, just to make sure we were not going to skip over anything monumental.

So down we went.


Jean-Francois Delvaen tries to save money on airfare back to Australia... by digging

By the end of the day the pit was so deep we had to climb out. It was well over 10ft deep and this magical mortar layer that we were trying to find was nowhere in sight. By the end of the day we had found nothing but the nadir of a dolium, which surfaced right towards the end of the day, of course. We were half way to Hawaii and we were told to stop. P8 had become so deep that everyone took a couple minutes to have a photo-op in the world’s deepest pit. I assure you, photos of all these things will be up within the month.

I spent the rest of Saturday afternoon catching up on sleep and preparing for the final dinner that night, put on by Balkan Heritage. The meal was filled with numerous traditional dishes, Bulgarian wines, and of course some ‘ракия’ (rakia) with the salad. Rakia is essentially a wine/brandy that is very potent and remarkably tasty. It is made out of various fruits, and has a very intense feel with a pleasant aftertaste. The dinner was held at the Wine Club Varna. We tasted wines, received our parting gifts, and were given our field school certificates.


Our Last Bulgarian Supper: Wine Club Varna

Sunday was a relaxing day. I spent most of it figuring out future plans and visiting, one last time, friends that I was no longer going to see.

At around 7:30pm I boarded the bus to Istanbul.



Eἰς Tὴν Πόλιν = eis tan polin or 'to the city'... is tan pol... Is tan bul.

Not Constantinople.


Eastern-Block vehicle now sits at a rest-stop along the Bulgarian Coast

I know I should have learned this several years ago when I had the pleasure of experiencing a night bus from Singapore to Butterworth, Malaysia, but I suppose I thought that this time it would be different. It was different, without a doubt, but it was actually worse. It was a Russian tour bus that I had ended up on and the tour guy spoke in Russian, ad nauseum, for four hours straight. By then it was midnight and we reached a segment of the road that apparently Bulgaria never got around to paving. For a possible explanation click here.

The bus hurled itself up terrain, rocks and all, for a long while. Twisting and turning, this bus owned the road. It is possible that it swallowed up some small cars coming the opposite way. There is no way anybody could have dodged that bus coming right at them. The beast heaved and rumbled onward until we reached the boarder. Once we stopped, the Turkish inspectors got onboard and took our passports. They disappeared and we were to stay seated. Waiting in confusion, the bus driver got on the bus and moved it to a totally different building. This was where we were to receive our Visas... but I still did not have my passport.

As anyone would be, I became a little concerned. Fear of becoming a statistic has lurked within the back of my mind this whole trip. This, out of everywhere I have been thus far, was not the place to be without your passport. Moments before I reached the desk to have it stamped for entry, I got it back. Instant relief. The customs agent stamped it and I walked out of the rustic M*A*S*H* camp-styled building that it was all situated in, and back onto the bus.

The interesting thing to note is that once we reached Turkish roads, immediately after the customs compound, it was like driving on roads of silk. It was so nice. Not a single crack was apparent. After all the waiting, by the time we got moving again it was 2am. Now was my chance. I hadn't been able to steal a wink of sleep all night. I was now going to do my best to be a dream bandit. Huddled as close as possible to the window of the bus, I put my arms across one another, closed my eyes, and rested my head at an angle. Thank God Turkey invested in roads. I needed the sleep.

Early in the morning we traveled through Edirne, the place in which Mehmet II, or The Conqueror, departed to begin the final siege against the Byzantines in 1453AD. We passed through the rubble of his destruction around 6am.

Now, with the sun just rising, I had finally made it to the, “…land of Byzantium, Oh, thrice-happy City, eye of the universe, ornament of the world, star shining afar, beacon of this lower world…”

Time to get busy.


Looking south along the Bulgarian coast

This will be the last entry for at least a couple weeks. There are a lot of things I wish to accomplish here and I do not have my resources with me to do my blog entries any justice. I apologize in advance.

Hopefully the next time you visit this blog I will finally have pictures to accompany the writing, as well as the final entries!