Almost everyone I mentioned it to looked at me with disbelief and said: 'Bulgaria? Why?'

Well, I told them, Bulgaria had the most important Womble named after it and reached the semi-finals of the World Cup in 1994... it was the home of the Thracians, a parallel civilisation to the ancient Greeks... and it has been shaped by many great empires – Roman, Greek, Turkish and Arabic, not to mention communism.

What's more, the place where we were to stay, Gela, is said to have been the birthplace of Orpheus, the mythical musician and poet. So we were expecting great things as we flew to Plovdiv, Bulgaria's second city, where we stopped for lunch.

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