Plovdiv; Monday, 14 October, 2024

I’d wanted to get an earlyish night the previous day as I only had a couple of hours to spare before I needed to start the journey home so had set my alarm for a normal Monday morning time.

After a quick breakfast I headed out of the hotel and over to the Bishops Basilica. This spectacular Byzantine era structure was only discovered during the works to create a new road – the same works that uncovered the late antiquity building by the subway I’d visited yesterday – the excavations revealed a large basilica church building almost completely covered in intricate mosaics with many still in really good condition. One of the most impressive being by what would have been the entrance way into the Basilica featuring a peacock with it’s tail on full display surrounded by other birds.

A raised glass floor lets you wander amongst the mosaics – and to keep it clean and easy to see through everyone has to put plastic shoe covers on – it does mean that despite the museum being a few years old the glass floor is still crystal clear with no scratches and the views down onto the mosaics are spectacular.

From the Bishops Basilica it was about a 10 minute walk back past the hotel to the second, smaller and final basilica of the trip. Discovered around the same time as the Bishops Basilica this smaller church still has a good few mosaics. It also has in it’s ground parts of the original fortifications of the Roman city, showing this was right on the edge of the old city of Philippopolis.

I would have liked to spend a bit more time here, but time was against me so I had to head back to the hotel, pack my bags, check out and walk the 30 minutes or so back to the bus station to pick up the bus back into Sofia.

My choice for buses had been either a 13:00 which was due into Sofia at 15:10 or a 15:10 departure which would have got me into Sofia at 17:30 – which felt like cutting it a little too fine for my 20:00 flight back to the UK, so I’d opted for the 13:00. It turns out that the timetable has quite a significant amount of padding in it as, despite mid-afternoon traffic in Sofia, we still arrived 10 minutes ahead of time at 15:00, so I probably could have risked the later bus.

This of course meant I had about 90 minutes to kill before I could realistically look to head out to the airport, but also luggage which made visiting anywhere difficult. In the end, as it was a very pleasant sunny afternoon I decided to go for a walk first off heading down into the centre of the city from the bus station to Serdika and then onto the Cathedral of Saint Nedelva, before turning East and walking over to the stunning Cathedral of Saint Alexander Nevsky.

By now I’d managed to use nearly an hour, so with a final walk down through the parkland behind the cathedral I eventually made it to the metro at Stadium 'Vasil Levski a little after 16:30, about the right time to hop on a metro over to the airport for my flight back to London.