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Smolyan Province
Coordinates: 41°40′N 24°35′E / 41.667°N 24.583°E
Smolyan Province (Bulgarian: Област Смолян - Oblast Smolyan, former name Smolyan okrug) is a province in Southern-central Bulgaria, located in the Rhodope Mountains, neighbouring Greece to the south. It is named after its administrative and industrial centre - the city of Smolyan. The province embraces a territory of 3,192.8 km² that is divided into 10 municipalities with a total population of 124,795 inhabitants, as of December 2009.
Municipalities
Smolyan Province (Област, oblast) contains 10 municipalities (singular: oбщина, obshtina - plural: Общини, obshtini). The following table shows the names of each municipality in English and Cyrillic, the main town or village (towns are shown in bold), and the population of each as of December 2009.
Population
The Smolyan province had a population of 140,066 according to the 2001 census, of which 48.8% were male and 51.2% were female. As of the end of 2009, the population of the province, announced by the Bulgarian National Statistical Institute, numbered 124,795 of which 23.4% are inhabitants aged over 60 years.
Smolyan
Smolyan (Bulgarian: Смолян) is a town and ski resort in the far south of Bulgaria near the border with Greece. It is the administrative and industrial centre of the homonymous Smolyan Province. The town is situated in the valley of the Cherna ("Black") and the Byala ("White") Rivers in the central Rhodopes at the foot of the mountains' highest part south of the popular ski resorts Pamporovo and Chepelare. As of February 2011, it has a population of 30,283 inhabitants.
Name
The town comes from the local Slavic tribe of the Smolyani, probably cognate to the Slavic word smola ("resin").
History
According to archaeological evidence, the area around Smolyan was first settled in the 2nd-1st millennium BC. In the Middle Ages it acquired its name from the Slavic tribe, the Smolyani, who settled in the region in the 7th century. During the Middle Ages, it was ruled by the Part of the Byzantine and Bulgarian Empires. For a while during the 14th-century it came under the control of the Bulgarian feudal lord Momchil, alongside the whole Rhodope mountains, before eventually being subjugated by the Ottoman Empire. Smolyan remained under Ottoman rule for five centuries, a township of the Ottoman Sanjak of Gümülcine in the Adrianople Vilayet between 1867 and 1912. It was known in Ottoman Turkish as Paşmaklı or Ahiçelebi.
6267 Rozhen
6267 Rozhen, provisional designation 1987 SO9, is a stony asteroid from the inner regions of the asteroid belt, about 3 kilometers in diameter. It was discovered by Belgian astronomer Eric Elst at Rozhen Observatory near Smoljan, Bulgaria, on 20 September 1987. For four days, between 27 and 31 January 2005, it was briefly and erroneously renamed 6267 Smolyan.
The S-type asteroid is a member of the Flora family, one of the largest groups of stony asteroids in the main-belt. It orbits the Sun at a distance of 2.0–2.4 AU once every 3 years and 2 months (1,161 days). Its orbit shows an eccentricity of 0.09 and an inclination of 2 degrees from the plane of the ecliptic.
In 2014, two photometric light-curve analysis at the U.S. Palomar Transient Factory, California, rendered a rotation period of 3.9847±0.0007 and 3.980±0.020 hours with a brightness amplitude of 0.14 and 0.12 in magnitude, respectively, while the Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link assumes an albedo of 0.24, a typical value for asteroids with a stony surface composition, and identical to the albedo of the Flora family's namesake, the asteroid 8 Flora.
