BULGARIA CITY IS EUROPE CULTURE CAPITAL

SOFIA, Bulgaria: Plovdiv, the oldest city in Bulgaria, has been officially inaugurated as the European Capital of Culture for 2019. Some 50,000 people gathered on a main square Saturday to watch the opening show dubbed “We are all colors” with 1,500 local and foreign artists on several stages. The entertainment included traditional Bulgarian folk dancers, 200 choir singers, a brass orchestra and a musical and laser spectacle. Squeezed between the Balkan and the Rodopi Mountains, Bulgaria’s second-largest city has survived for thousands of years on the crossroads between Western Europe and the Middle East. Plovdiv is in central Bulgaria, 144 kilometers (90 miles) southeast of Sofia, the capital. Plovdiv claims to be the oldest continually inhabited European city, with more than 6,000 years of history. Evidence of that can be seen in many architectural landmarks dating back to Thracian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman times.