Hither Rumelia, around Pernik

Reached the western border of modern Bulgaria at last:

Remember when we were just trying to go east through Ukraine?  That's a long way north of here.

The Sofia cluster extends outwards to the south, but it stops dead at Macedonia (which is why the border is there).  The isolation of that group of mountains adjacent to Sofia is more obvious now, with the plain encircling it.

Not much to say ... I've got to get back to the Streetvendor's Guide, while getting ready for running D&D tonight.  Sorry if I'm not going too much in depth into these parts.  The Balkans are not a fascination for me, just a series of isolated social cultures that were kept at each other's throats by the Ottomans for 600 years.  Converts to Islam tended to be mountain people, who had a distaste for the plains-people already ... and those hatreds between highlands and plains continue to this day.  Moreover, the Ottomans kept the various Christian churches of Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania and such isolated (and played off against each other), so that even today there's no solidarity between either the various Orthodox or Catholic churches.  It makes for hatred, violence, constant squabbling and institutional backwardness.  And it's been going on a long time.