Serdica

My visit to Malta in January this year was closely followed by a trip to Sofia in Bulgaria.  As the snow has finally left the UK for the season, sifting through these pictures of a city in snow is quite peculiar.  I only spent around 1.5 days in Sofia itself.  The remainder of my time was at the International Parachuting Commission plenary meeting, the 2018 equivalent of the meeting that took me to Faro in 2017.

During my ‘holiday’ part of the trip I stayed in a hotel built right on top of the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre, which is therefore called the Arena di Serdica.  Serdica having been the name of this city in Roman times.  When you look down from the hotel lobby you can see the remains of rooms and their doors, now providing dividing spaces during a conference coffee break.

In other parts of the city, the Roman remains have also been preserved.  While walking at street level I has seen a couple of these sky-light bubbles.  Peering down I couldn’t quite make out what was underneath them and I assumed it was platforms for an underground train.

I later found out, they were a way of providing natural light onto ancient walls and the evidence of early plumbing.

Some of these ancient walls were later added to and improved with ‘modern’ construction methods such as hand-made brick, and later still machine made brick

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