The Dolmen at Hlyabovo

In a wooded ravine in the Sakar hills of southeastern Bulgaria, two granite tombs stand side by side behind a single monumental front wall. This is the Dolmen at Hlyabovo, in the Nachevi Chairi area west of the village of Hlyabovo. Finds from its excavation point to Thracian builders around the 9th or 8th century BCE, and it lay under a mound about 10 meters high until archaeologists uncovered it in the 1970s. It is the largest of the dolmens that survive around the village, part of a once much larger cluster of stone tombs in the Sakar and Strandzha mountains.

What is a Thracian dolmen?

A dolmen is a chamber made of upright stone slabs and roofed with more slabs. In ancient Thrace such chambers were built in the hills where Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey now meet: in Strandzha, in Sakar and, more sparsely, in the Eastern Rhodopes. Chambers are usually about 1.9 to 2.8 meters long and up to 2 meters high, closed by a front slab with a narrow opening. Each was covered by a mound of earth and stones, often ringed at its foot by a low stone wall called a crepis, and almost all open toward the south.

Remains of several people are often found in one dolmen, which archaeologists read as family tombs used over generations, and the tombs are believed to have been built for people of high status. By one estimate, more than 800 dolmens still stood in Bulgaria at the end of the 19th century; today no more than about 200 survive in reasonable condition. Villagers broke many up for building stone or to clear fields, and treasure hunters damaged many more. In Sakar, people still call them dragon houses, and some local voices read them as more than tombs (see Beyond).

How old is the Dolmen at Hlyabovo?

Thracian dolmens are usually dated between the 12th and the 6th century BCE, from the end of the Bronze Age into the Early Iron Age, and the finds from Nachevi Chairi point to construction in the 9th or 8th century BCE. Lyubomir Tsonev and Dimiter Kolev, who compiled data on 110 Bulgarian dolmens in 2013, note that the usual range rests mainly on material from the last burials. They call for direct methods, such as optically stimulated luminescence, which dates when buried mineral grains last saw daylight, to find when each tomb was first built.

Veselin Kulvachev, director of the history museum in nearby Topolovgrad, asks the same question of the Sakar dolmens in general. In a 2020 interview with Radio Bulgaria, which does not discuss Hlyabovo by name, he said the Thracian burial finds belong to that period, but whether the chambers themselves were built then or earlier is not known.

As the excavated finds stand, the Thracian dates are far later than those of western Europe's dolmens. A passage grave such as the Dolmen of Guadalperal in Spain was built in the 4th or 3rd millennium BCE, and the first earthwork at Stonehenge dates to about 3000 BCE. For the popular idea that the Hlyabovo dolmens are as old as Stonehenge, direct dates from the chambers themselves would be the test.

What you see at the Dolmen at Hlyabovo

The Nachevi Chairi tomb is unusual even among Thracian dolmens. Excavation revealed two dolmens joined together, each with a front and a rear chamber, behind one monumental façade, with their capstones still in place. Ancient Bulgaria, a heritage guide to the country's antiquities, describes the design as without a known match. A cross-border heritage inventory of the Maritsa–Evros region gives one of the two-chamber dolmens here a front chamber of about 1.4 by 1.4 meters and a rear chamber about 2 meters long, 1.4 meters wide and 1.5 meters high, with openings only 0.55 to 0.65 meters wide. The entrances face south.

The slabs are local granite, the usual stone of dolmens in Sakar and Strandzha. A memoir by the historian Petar Yankov, published by the Burgas regional museum, notes that the nearest matching stone for the largest dolmens here lies more than a kilometer away, along the Sokolitsa River, so the builders hauled their slabs to the site.

How the Hlyabovo dolmens were explored

The hills around Hlyabovo once held far more of these tombs. In the late 19th century the brothers Hermann and Karel Škorpil counted 75 dolmens here, and in 1901 Georgi Bonchev described more than 100. By 1969 the regional museum in Yambol could catalog only seven survivors. One small dolmen at the north end of the village stood until the 1950s, when local people took it apart for building stone.

Excavation came with the expeditions of the Institute of Thracology led by Ivan Venedikov and Alexander Fol in 1973–1976. Small trial trenches at Nachevi Chairi in 1974 cleared part of the entrance passage, and in 1976 excavation exposed the façade wall and a second dolmen built against the first. That second tomb held the first documented burial remains from the site, along with plentiful finds. Ancient Bulgaria describes them as the first human remains found in a structure of this kind in Bulgaria.

Visiting the Dolmen at Hlyabovo

Hlyabovo lies in Topolovgrad Municipality, Haskovo Province, on the northern slope of the Sakar mountains, about 10 kilometers from Topolovgrad on the road toward Harmanli. The dolmen sits in a ravine southeast of the road from Hlyabovo to Balgarska Polyana, at the end of a signposted path. The Hlyabovo dolmens were declared a natural landmark by an order of 5 February 1964.

Other tombs nearby reward a longer walk. A large two-chamber dolmen at Gaydarova Peshtera, visible from Nachevi Chairi, still sits in its mound, partly ringed by a crepis of massive slabs about 11 meters across. The so-called Royal Dolmen at Byalata Treva lies some 3.5 kilometers south of the village. Guides spell and place these localities differently, so a local map helps.