IN THE LAND OF TREASURES
In 1851, near the village Rozovets located in the Kazanlak valley, a certain grandfather Stoyan took out from a barrow a marble block. An opening gaped and precious antiques shined inside: even before Schliemann to excavate the Troy, the first Thracian treasure was discovered. It contained a gold wreath and things reminding those described by Homer in his epos: there, for the first time, the shining Thracian dinner sets and royal accoutrements were praised in song. In Bulgarian lands, the practice to lay precious metals in graves is older by three millennia than this was practiced in the times of the Trojan War. The earliest, from the end of the 5th millennium BC, are the gold findings at the village of Hotnitsa, the Varna and Dourankoulak necropolises. During the following three millennia, no gold objects have so far been found in Thrace. Such items appeared again only in the first centuries of the 1st millennium BC, from the time of which the cups found at town of Belene and the village Kazichene as well as in the Valchitran treasure most likely have come.
