Saturday was an trip to Rila Monastery in the Rila Mountains. On the way was a stop a the town of Dupnitsa, then known as Stanke Dimitrov. The town had been renamed in 1949 for Stanke Dimitrov an early Bulgarian Communist leader. Turkish tobacco had been introduced to Bulgaria during the period of Ottoman rule. (Tobacco had been introduced to Turkey by the Spanish, who imported it from the Americas. The Ottomans subsequently developed their own means of cultivation.) In 1975, Dupnitsa was the center of the Bulgarian tobacco growing industry. In the Cold War era, the Bulgarian tobacco industry was huge. Bulgaria was then the worlds leading exporter of cigarettes and supplied the USSR and the Eastern Bloc countries with their tobacco products. Evidence of this major industry could be seen by the stacks of tobacco leaves drying everywhere along Dupnitsas main streets. Residential courtyards had tobacco drying areas or tobacco storage sheds.
It had been amazing to discover that so much volume of rose oil and so much tobacco is produced in Bulgaria!
