The story of Burgas

The land around the three lakes was Thracian long before it was anything else. The tribes here fished the lagoons, worked the salt and used the hot springs inland at what is now Vetren, where a sanctuary stood around the spring.

The gold and bronze in the archaeology museum in the centre comes largely from this world: grave goods, votive plaques and the horse gear of a people who left no cities behind on this bay.

The Romans built their town away from the exposed bay. Deultum, founded as a colony for army veterans on the Sredetska river south-west of today's city, was the administrative centre of this coast; its ruins are an archaeological reserve at Debelt.

Closer in, the hot springs became Aquae Calidae — a spa town with a bath complex that drew visitors from across the province. The spring never stopped: fifteen centuries later Suleiman the Magnificent built his own bath over it, and that building still stands.

Byzantine and medieval Bulgarian rule left small fortresses and watchtowers around the bay rather than a town. The name Burgas is generally traced to those towers — from the Greek pyrgos and its Latin equivalent burgos.

Trade and power on this coast belonged to the walled harbour towns: Mesembria, which is Nessebar, and Apollonia, which is Sozopol. Both are still there, and both are half an hour away.

Under Ottoman rule the settlement on the bay was a modest place of fishermen and salt workers, overshadowed by Anchialos — today's Pomorie — up the coast. Salt from the lagoons was its one export of consequence.

That salt is still being harvested from the same pans at Atanasovsko Lake, by the same method, which makes it the oldest continuous industry in the district.

After 1878 the town found itself in the autonomous province of Eastern Rumelia, and joined the Bulgarian principality with the unification of 1885. What made it a city, though, was infrastructure: the railway inland, and then the harbour.

The commercial port opened in 1903 and changed everything — grain and salt out, coal and machinery in, and a merchant class that laid out the streets and built the houses you walk past on Bogoridi today.

The Sea Garden was laid out along the clifftop from 1910 to a design by the gardener Georgi Duhtev, and it set the character of the city: the park, not a square, is where Burgas gathers.

Between the wars the city grew on fish, salt and shipping, and acquired the casino building, the bathhouses and the promenade that still frame the waterfront.

The socialist decades turned Burgas into an industrial city. The petrochemical works north-west of town, built from the early 1960s, became the largest refinery on the Balkan peninsula, and the districts of prefabricated blocks — Lazur, Izgrev, Slaveykov, Meden Rudnik — went up to house the workforce.

The population multiplied several times over in a generation. Most people who live in Burgas today live in that city, not the merchant one.

Since the 2000s the city has spent its money on the waterfront: the pier rebuilt, the park extended, the old port warehouses opened up as a cultural quarter, the lakes protected and threaded with cycle paths, and the airport at Sarafovo grown into a proper gateway.

Arena Burgas, the indoor hall that will host the contest, belongs to the same programme — a venue built for a city that decided it would rather be a destination than a refinery town.

In May 2027 Burgas becomes the host city of the Eurovision Song Contest. For a city that only got a harbour in 1903, hosting the largest live music event in the world is not a small thing.

It is also the first time most of Europe will look closely at this stretch of coast. What they will find is a young city on very old ground — which is the whole story of this page.