Before Plovdiv: How a Settlement Climbed to the Hills

In the photograph from 1892, Dzhambaz Tepe is already covered with houses, its slope rising above the lower city. The rocky dome looks like a natural pedestal, but it belongs to a larger group of syenite hills that reach roughly 250 metres. They give Plovdiv a silhouette that can be recognized before any individual building comes into focus.

Six of the celebrated seven hills survive today. Markovo Tepe was quarried away during the twentieth century, while the others still divide, guide and gather the streets around them. Before there was a city called Plovdiv, the terrain had already determined where a person could see far across the plain—and where a settlement might become a defended centre.

The earliest known beginning is not found in the postcard view of the Old Town. Between 6000 and 5000 BC, Neolithic communities were already living in the area of present-day Plovdiv. Among the best-studied traces is the settlement mound of Yasa Tepe in today's Lauta district—well beyond the romantic idea that everything began on the Three Hills.

That distinction changes the story. The wider landscape was inhabited first; only later did a political and fortified centre gather on higher ground. The city did not appear in a single moment. It grew from repeated choices about where to live, and the movement toward the hills marks the passage from an early settlement to a place that could be defended and governed.

By the fifth century BC, a fortified Thracian settlement known as Eumolpias or Eumolpeida stood on the Three Hills. With the rise of the Odrysian kingdom, the settlement and its surroundings entered a wider political world. Height was no longer merely convenient ground on which to live: it enclosed a centre from which the plain could be watched and the approaches guarded.

Here, scattered traces of human presence begin to resemble an urban biography. A name identifies a community, a fortification draws a boundary, and the hills bind the two together. Eumolpias is not simply an earlier label for Plovdiv. It marks the point at which the place belonged to the political world of ancient Thrace.

At Nebet Tepe, the shift toward a fortified city can be read in the masonry itself. The oldest surviving defences date to the fourth century BC: large syenite blocks were fitted without mortar, and a quadrangular tower guarded the western side. The fortress was not an ornament on the hill. It turned natural height into an organized place of authority and defence.

Later eras did not abandon that choice. A Roman bastion, a sixth-century passage beneath the northern wall, and a large cistern holding roughly 350 cubic metres accumulated on the same summit. Each addition reused the advantage earlier inhabitants had already recognized. Nebet Tepe preserves not one frozen antiquity, but a succession of decisions to fortify and adapt the same ground.

In 342 BC, the forces of Philip II of Macedon captured the fortified town. It became known as Philippopolis, and its stronghold offered a base for further Macedonian expansion into Thrace. For the inhabitants this was a sharp political change; for the hills, it was another ruler recognizing their value.

The new name carried the victory into the city's identity. It did not erase the earlier Eumolpias, but covered it with a new authority and a new memory. Plovdiv would acquire other names in later centuries, yet Philippopolis endured because it joined a military conquest to the emergence of the fortified Thracian centre as a city operating on a larger political scale.

Today the Old Town spreads across Nebet, Dzhambaz and Taksim Tepe. Houses, streets and later monuments conceal parts of the ancient centre, but they do not alter its basic form. From Nebet Tepe the plain is still visible—the same broad landscape that connects the early settlements, the Thracian stronghold and the expanding city.

Plovdiv's earliest history is therefore not a contest for one founding date. It begins with life across a wider landscape, climbs toward the defended hills, and continues through every authority that chooses to build on them. The names change; the rocky terrain remains an active part of the city.