Varna

Thracians lived around the bay long before Greek settlers from Miletus founded a trading post here towards the end of the 7th century BC. Odessos, as they called it, became prosperous on sea trade and led the Pontic Pentapolis, a league of five Greek cities on the coast. Under Rome, Odessus covered 47 hectares of today's centre and built large public baths in the late 2nd century AD; it was also an early Christian centre, and in 442 a peace treaty between Theodosius II and Attila was signed here.

The Bulgars settled densely around the lakes in the 7th century, and by the late 10th century the name Varna was so well established that the Byzantines kept it. In the later Middle Ages Genoese, Venetian and Ragusan merchants made it a thriving port, exporting wheat, honey, wax and wine. The Ottomans took Varna in 1389, and on 10 November 1444 they routed a crusader army under Władysław III of Poland and Hungary outside its walls. The town then served the Ottomans as a port, shipbuilding centre and one of the four fortresses of the Quadrilateral, supplying grain to Constantinople.

In 1878, with about 26,000 inhabitants, Varna passed to Bulgaria. It became the country's main export port and a seaside resort; in the 1890s the Czech landscape architect Anton Novak began laying out the Sea Garden. The loss of southern Dobruja to Romania hurt its economy between the wars. The communist years brought large housing estates and the resorts to the north, and in 1973 the Olympic Congress met at the new Palace of Culture and Sports. Varna was European Youth Capital in 2017.

Varna has some of the oldest museums and arts companies in the country — the Archaeological Museum dates from 1888, and the first philharmonic society from the same year — along with a drama theatre founded in 1921, an opera, and a state puppet theatre often called the finest in the nation. Over the past decades it has become a festival city of international standing: the Varna Summer music festival, founded in 1926, is joined by festivals of jazz, theatre, short film, folk music and puppetry. The International Ballet Competition, founded in 1964 and dubbed the "Olympics of dance", has been on hold since 2020.

The city is also known nationwide for its rock and hip-hop artists, clubs and graffiti scene, and in summer the waterfront clubs play everything from rock to chalga, Bulgarian pop-folk. Football means Cherno More, founded in 1913, and their rivals Spartak Varna; matches between the two are known as the Derby of Varna.

The port's long history of trade left a mixed heritage. In 1881 Turkish, Bulgarian and Greek speakers each made up a large share of the population, and the city still has an Armenian church, two Roman Catholic churches and several Protestant congregations alongside its Orthodox cathedral and older churches such as the former Greek metropolitan cathedral of St Athanasius.

The 2011 census counted about 335,000 people in Varna, the country's third-largest city; at the end of 2025 the wider agglomeration of the Varna, Beloslav and Devnya municipalities had about 348,000. In July and August the number of people in the city rises to around 600,000 with visitors and seasonal workers. The city is divided into five boroughs, among them Odessos, the historic centre; Primorski, the largest, which takes in the northern resorts; Mladost, with its large mall and shopping cluster; and Asparuhovo across the bay. The housing estates built between the 1960s and the 1980s, when the population tripled, still house many residents, while the old vineyards around the city have filled with villas.

The economy is mostly services: trade and tourism produce about three-fifths of revenue, followed by manufacturing, transport and construction. The Port of Varna is the largest in Bulgaria, the Bulgarian Navy and merchant fleet have their headquarters here, and shipbuilding and ship repair remain important. The University of Economics, founded in 1920, the Medical University, the Technical University and the Varna Free University give the city a large student population, including many foreign medical students.

Life moves outdoors for much of the year — coffee in the Sea Garden, evening walks along the beach alley, long summer evenings on the seafront. Some Roma neighbourhoods on the western edge remain poor, a reminder of the gap between the prosperous centre and the city's fringes.

Varna eats from the Black Sea. Grilled fish, both saltwater and freshwater, is a staple of the beachfront restaurants, and fisherman's soup, ribena chorba, is a spicy fish soup made with thyme and fresh lovage. Mussels in butter with onion and fresh herbs are traditionally from Sozopol, further south. On St Nicholas's Day, 6 December, the traditional meal is fish, usually carp.

The rest of the table is the national one. Tarator, a cold soup of cucumbers, garlic, yogurt and dill, is the classic summer starter, and shopska salad — cucumbers, onions, peppers and tomatoes with white cheese — is a common salad. Breakfast is banitsa, a filo pastry most famously made with eggs, sirene cheese and yogurt, or mekitsi, deep-fried dough served with jam, honey, cheese or icing sugar, from the bakeries of the centre.

The grill, or skara, supplies kebapche and kyufte, and the Ottoman inheritance shows in gyuvetch, moussaka and baklava. Rakia is the everyday spirit, beer flows on the beach, and the Euxinograd palace north of the city has a winery of its own.