Nicopolis ad Istrum

Listen for a moment. Out here, in the open farmland near the village of Nikyup, the loudest sounds are usually the wind in the grass and the call of birds over the fields. Underfoot, you feel worn paving stones, broken column drums, and low walls of pale limestone. They rise only knee-high in many places. Yet these stones once lined the streets of a Roman city. People called it, quite proudly, the City of Victory.

That is what the name means. Nicopolis comes from the Greek words for victory and city. The second part, ad Istrum, means near the Istros, the ancient name for the Danube. Here is the first surprise. The Danube is not near at all. The great river runs far to the north, beyond the horizon. The nearest water is the smaller Rositsa River, which flows through the valley close by. The name was a statement of ambition, not a map.

The victory in question belonged to the Emperor Trajan. In the early second century, Trajan fought hard wars against the Dacians, a powerful people who lived north of the Danube in what is now Romania. When those campaigns ended in Roman success, the emperor founded new cities to mark the triumph. This was one of them. It was a monument you could live inside — a city built as a trophy.

Now look at the ground plan around you. Roman engineers liked order, and they laid out the town on a grid. Streets crossed each other at right angles, dividing the city into neat blocks. Many of these streets were paved with large stone slabs. If you look closely, some of them still carry the slight dips and grooves of long use. Underneath, stone drains carried water and waste away from homes and public buildings.

The heart of the city was the central square, a wide open space for trade, politics, and gossip. Columns once surrounded it, carrying a covered walkway where people could shelter from the summer sun or the winter rain. Around this square stood temples, offices, and shops. Picture it full of merchants, officials in white robes, and farmers from the surrounding hills selling grain, wine, and livestock.

Here comes the second surprise. Although Nicopolis was a Roman foundation with a Latin name, its public life ran largely in Greek. The inscriptions found here are mostly in Greek, and the city was governed in the Greek manner, with a council and a citizens' assembly. Many settlers likely came from the Greek-speaking East. So, in the middle of the Balkans, a Roman victory city spoke the language of Athens and Asia Minor.

Near the square, archaeologists uncovered a small roofed theatre, often called an odeon. It was built for music, recitals, and speeches rather than large spectacles. Its curved rows of seats faced a small stage. Try to imagine the acoustics on a quiet evening, with a single voice carrying across the stone. Elsewhere in the city stood public baths, where citizens washed, exercised, and talked business in rooms of different temperatures.

All of this needed water, and the Romans brought it from the hills. An aqueduct carried fresh water into the city from springs some distance away. Traces of this system have been studied in the surrounding countryside. Clean, flowing water was not a luxury here. It was a sign of Roman civilisation, and it fed fountains, baths, and the homes of wealthier families.

The city also minted its own coins, especially in the late second and early third centuries. These bronze coins showed the reigning emperor on one side. On the other side, they showed gods, temples, and civic symbols of Nicopolis itself. Today these coins turn up in museum collections across Europe. They are one of the reasons historians know so much about the city's identity and its pride.

But life on the frontier was never fully safe. In the third century, Gothic warriors crossed the Danube and raided deep into the Roman provinces. Around the middle of that century, a battle was fought near Nicopolis. The Emperor Decius defeated a Gothic army here, though the wider war soon turned badly for Rome. The city survived, but the peaceful years of open streets and wide squares were over.

One quieter story belongs to the fourth century. A Gothic bishop named Wulfila led a community of Christian Goths to settle in this region, south of the Danube, under Roman protection. Wulfila is remembered for creating an alphabet for the Gothic language and translating much of the Bible into it. That work is among the oldest surviving writing in any Germanic language — a distant relative of English and German.

In the fifth century, the Huns swept through the Balkans, and the city suffered heavily. Later, a smaller fortified town was built just to the south, with strong walls and churches. Its people were fewer, and they lived behind defences rather than in an open grid. By the end of the sixth century, after further invasions, urban life here faded away. The fields slowly covered what remained.

Today, the site is quiet again. Excavations by Bulgarian archaeologists, and later by international teams, have brought much of the city back into the light. As you walk, notice the textures. There are smooth paving slabs, rough rubble cores of walls, and the clean edges of carved stone. Look up from the ruins to the hills on the horizon. They are the same hills Roman farmers worked.

Before you leave, stand for a moment in the old central square. Feel the wind and listen to the fields. Two thousand years ago, this spot was full of voices speaking Greek, Latin, and Gothic. Now it holds only a few visitors and the low hum of insects. As you walk back toward the road, look down once more at the stones beneath your feet. Each one was placed here to celebrate a victory.