Hither & Further Rumelia, around Filibe

At last, done with Further Rumelia:

Here we buttress against the Rhodope Mts., significant in ancient history in that it cramped the Greeks against the sea, the same way the Appalachians confined America to the Atlantic seaboard for two centuries.  It meant that the thinly scattered tribes north of those mountains received little culture until much later, when the Romans came over the mountain passes and annexed these rich farmlands.  The development of Byzantium allowed constant access and transport in and out of these plains, elevating them to a rich province of that empire, and of the Ottomans later.  These latter control all of this in the 17th century.

The next stage is to build out Hither Rumelia, which is another densely infrastructured valley, but narrower, surrouding the Isker River that flows south through the Rhodope into Macedonia.