Trail
Kartalov Clearings
A 15 km loop linking a 4,000-year-old rock inscription, Nadarska Cave, high stone villages, Kartalov Peak (1,478 m) and an 1896 church.
A few hundred metres into this walk, a mark is cut into the rock that no one has ever managed to read. The Nadarski inscription is reckoned four to five thousand years old, most likely Thracian, kin to the famous carvings at Sitovo and Belintash. What it says, or why anyone climbed up here to say it, is still anybody's guess.
From that opening riddle the loop keeps handing you the past. It passes Nadarska Cave, then the upper neighbourhood of Dimovo, a scatter of stone houses above 1,300 metres with only a handful of people left in them. It tops out on Kartalov Peak, named for the great eagles that once hunted this air, with Greece laid out to the south across Kushnitsa and Bozdag, and Golyam Perelik and the Arden ridge standing closer to home.
The way down threads through Kremene, past its little museum and the Holy Trinity church raised in 1896, then drops onto an old track under spruce trees centuries old before it returns you, quietly, to where you began.
Chereshovo is the ruined site of the Agush family's summer lodges, not to be confused with the great Agushevi Konatsi mansion at Mogilitsa. Nadarska Cave along the way requires advance booking.