Stara Zagora

The site has been lived on almost without a break since the end of the 7th millennium BC. Four prehistoric settlements grew up on and around it, and in 1968 two houses of the mid-6th millennium BC were found in the town — the best preserved of their age in Europe. The town of Beroe followed in the 5th–4th centuries BC, and the Romans renamed it Ulpia Augusta Traiana after the emperor Trajan. Under Marcus Aurelius it gained straight streets, walls with some forty towers, a forum and a theatre-like auditorium, and became the most important city of the province of Thrace.

Through the Middle Ages the town changed hands between Byzantium and Bulgaria and changed names with them: Vereia, then Irenopolis after the empress Irene rebuilt it in 784, then Boruy to the Bulgarians. The Ottomans took it in 1371 and called it Eski Zagra, from which the present name, adopted in 1871, derives. It was the centre of a failed uprising in 1875.

On 31 July 1877, in the first major battle of the Russo-Turkish War, a small Russian force and Bulgarian volunteers lost the town to a much larger Ottoman army. Over the following days the town was burned to the ground and about 14,000 Bulgarian civilians from the town and villages to the south were killed; only the Eski Mosque survived among its public buildings. After 1878 the city became part of Eastern Rumelia, which joined Bulgaria in 1886, and was rebuilt on the rectangular plan of Lubor Bayer, with the first stone laid in 1879.

Stara Zagora has long been called the city of poets, and its linden trees and its opera are points of local pride. The lindens were planted along the new streets when the city was rebuilt, and their flowering is celebrated each year from late May to mid-July. Many Bulgarian poets lived and wrote here, among them Geo Milev, born nearby. The State Opera, founded in 1925, was the second opera company in the country and remains the oldest outside Sofia; its stage presents opera, ballet, operetta and children's shows, and it hosts a long-running festival of opera and ballet.

The memory of 1877 runs deep. Monuments around the city commemorate the massacre and the defence of the town, and the memorial complex on a hill in a city park, a concrete replica of the Samara flag, honours the defenders; torchlight processions mark the anniversary of the massacre each year. The city's Roman and prehistoric heritage is a second source of pride, shown in the regional history museum and the Neolithic dwellings.

Football follows PFC Beroe, founded in 1916 and named after the ancient town, which won the Bulgarian Cup in 2010 and 2013 and now plays in the Second League. Most people are Orthodox Christians; at the 2011 census about nine in ten declared themselves Bulgarian, with smaller Roma and Turkish communities.

About 121,000 people live in the city, according to the national statistics office's estimate for the end of 2025, making it the fifth-largest city in Bulgaria. Its population peaked above 160,000 around 1989–91 and has fallen since as people moved to Sofia or abroad. It is the administrative centre of Stara Zagora Province, and Trakia University, founded in 1995 in the west of the city, teaches medicine, veterinary medicine, economics, education and agriculture, with some degrees now taught in English.

The economy is among the strongest in provincial Bulgaria, with wages among the highest in the country. The largest employer is the Maritsa Iztok complex of coal mines and power stations on the plain, where many of the city's people work and which supplies a large share of the country's electricity. It is also politically contested: it is Bulgaria's largest source of carbon emissions and has badly polluted nearby towns, yet many families depend on it. Zagorka, the country's largest brewery, the electricity distributor for southern Bulgaria and engineering plants make up much of the rest, and the surrounding Zagore district grows wheat, vegetables, fruit and grapes.

Most people live in apartment districts built after the Second World War around the centre, several of them former villages absorbed by the city. Evenings centre on the pedestrian shopping streets and the parks, with two large shopping malls opened since 2008.

Stara Zagora's own contribution to the Bulgarian table is drink. Zagorka beer has been brewed in the city since 1902, when a doctor who had returned from Prague founded the company in the Czech tradition; the present brewery opened in 1958, belongs to Heineken and holds a large share of the national market. The Domaine Menada winery, based in the city, and the winery at nearby Oryahovitsa make Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Chardonnay and Dimiat wines.

Restaurants serve Bulgarian and international food, many of them clustered around Zagorka Lake on the edge of the city. The everyday Bulgarian staples are found everywhere: banitsa, a pie of filo pastry layered with whisked eggs, yogurt and white brined cheese, eaten for breakfast with yogurt, ayran or boza; and lyutenitsa, a relish of peppers, tomatoes, aubergines, carrots and garlic.

Rakia, the fruit brandy of south-eastern Europe, usually around 40 per cent alcohol, is the customary spirit, and the city's farmland — the Zagore district of wheat, vegetables and fruit — keeps its markets supplied with produce.