Sahat Tepe

The clock-tower hill in the middle of town, with one of the oldest working clock towers in Europe on top.

Sahat Tepe — Clock Hill, also called Danov Hill — is the small wooded rise between the main shopping street and the Roman stadium, five minutes from the centre and almost entirely used by locals. A path of shallow steps winds up through pines to a clearing at the top with the whitewashed Ottoman clock tower in the middle of it.

The view is lower and closer than the one from Nebet Tepe: rooftops, the pedestrian street below, the other hills across the city. What it has instead is quiet. There is a bench or two, no kiosk, no entrance, and on a weekday afternoon you will share it with a dog walker.

It works best as a twenty-minute detour off the main street rather than a destination. The path up from the western side is the gentler of the two.

things to do sight viewpoint Listed by Travelling Buzz
A story
The clock tower was already standing in 1611, when an Ottoman traveller recorded it, which makes it one of the oldest in the Balkans and arguably in Europe. It burned, was rebuilt in the 1800s, and the mechanism was replaced again in the twentieth century — but the hill has been telling Plovdiv the time for four hundred years.

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