Wall and Building Ruins

Topeiros began as a Roman foundation in the first century AD, laid out under Augustus on the site of an older Thracian settlement, where the Nestos river met the Via Egnatia. The Byzantine historian Prokopios mentions the city, and its fortifications were patched up in the sixth century after a Slavic raid in 549 AD had knocked them down. That repair, however, did little good: the town never truly recovered, and its end came in 812, when Krum, the Bulgar ruler, swept through Thrace and sacked a great many cities and strongholds, Topeiros among them. What survives today is meagre, only scattered stretches of the old wall, and the site is classed as a ruined Byzantine city. The stones that remain give little hint of the busy road junction it once guarded, where imperial highways and river traffic met, before the raiders and the centuries reduced it to this quiet remnant.