Approaching MELNIK you'll catch glimpses of the wall of mountains that allowed the townsfolk to thumb their noses at the Byzantine Empire in the eleventh century. Melnik hides until the last moment, encircled by hard-edged crags, scree slopes and sandstone cones. Its straggling main street is lined with mehanas , whitewashed stone houses on timber props festooned with flowers, and vines overhanging cobbled alleys and narrow courtyards. Rooms for rent and wine for sale make it plain that the locals are used to tourists, while the new hotels being built attest to the sums that outsiders are now investing, yet it remains to be seen if this will reverse Melnik's extraordinary decline, from a town of 20,000 people in 1880 to a village of around 250 today. A century ago the population was largely Greek, making it a unique outpost of Hellenic civilization in a Slav sea, whence mules departed laden with wine for foreign lands. But the economy waned towards the end of the century and the Second Balkan War of 1913 destroyed the town, sundered its trade routes and provoked a bout of ethnic cleansing. Today, memories of this Greek past have faded and it's hard to imagine so many extra houses, despite the scores of ruins on the hillsides.

Melnik's layout is simple, with a single main street running alongside a (usually dry) riverbed spanned by rickety footbridges, then diverging into two gullies. Due to the terrain, houses are small at ground level but expand outwards further up, with the living quarters on the upper floors jutting out above the lower barred and shuttered levels that function as cellars or barns. Tiny backstreets invite aimless wandering, while the hillsides abound in tortoises and lizards.