Stara Zagora

Stara Zagora (Bulgarian: Стара Загора) is a city in Bulgaria, a nationally important economic center. Located in Southern Bulgaria, it is the administrative capital of the homonymous Stara Zagora Province.

As of December 2014, the city has a population of 149,137 inhabitants. According to Operative Program Regional Development of Bulgaria, the agglomeration of Stara Zagora is the fifth largest in Bulgaria and has a population of 213,444 inhabitants.

Stara Zagora is known as the city of straight streets, linden trees, and poets.

Name

The name comes from the Slavic root star ("old") and the name of the medieval region of Zagore ("beyond the [Balkan] mountains" in Slavic)

History

The favourable geographic and climatic conditions of the territory around Stara Zagora contributed to the establishment of several prehistoric settlements in the remote past. More than 100 prehistoric mounds from the 6th to 3rd millennium BC were found in the vicinity of Stara Zagora. One of them, the Bereketska mound, is the largest in Bulgaria, containing traces of people that lived there from the New Stone Age (6th millennium BC) to the Middle Ages (12th century). A prehistoric settlement can be found within the city itself. Two dwellings from the New Stone Age are preserved in the Neolithic Dwellings Museum. These are the best preserved dwellings from the New Stone or Neolithic Age (6th millennium BC) in Europe and contain a rich collection of tools and artefacts. The oldest copper mines in Europe (5th millennium BC) were found 8 km (4.97 mi) east of the city, A considerable amount of copper ore was extracted from the 11 mines by the ancient inhabitants of this land who traded with it throughout the continent.

Stara Zagora Province

Coordinates: 42°25′N 25°30′E / 42.417°N 25.500°E / 42.417; 25.500

Stara Zagora (Bulgarian: Област Стара Загора oblast Stara Zagora, former name Stara Zagora okrug) is a province of south central Bulgaria. It is named after its administrative and industrial centre—the city of Stara Zagora—the sixth-biggest town in the country. The province embraces a territory of 5,151.1 km² that is divided into 11 municipalities with a total population, as of December 2009, of 350,925 inhabitants.

In the southeastern part of the province on the edge of Radnevo Municipality there is a coal production facility. Between 1934 and 1949, the province included parts of the present Kardzhali Province.

Municipalities

The Stara Zagora province (oбласт, oblast) contains 11 municipalities (Bulgarian: singular: oбщина, obshtina - plural: oбщини, 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.

Stara

Stara [ˈstara] is a village in the administrative district on Gmina Aleksandrów, within Piotrków County, Łódź Voivodeship, in central Poland. It lies approximately 5 kilometres (3 mi) south-west of Aleksandrów, 27 km (17 mi) south-east of Piotrków Trybunalski, and 70 km (43 mi) south-east of the regional capital Łódź.

The village has a population of 160.

References

Coordinates: 51°14′10″N 19°57′21″E / 51.23611°N 19.95583°E / 51.23611; 19.95583

Ēostre

Ēostre or Ostara (Old English: Ēastre, Northumbrian dialect Ēostre; Old High German: *Ôstara (reconstructed form)) is a Germanic divinity who, by way of the Germanic month bearing her name (Northumbrian: Ēosturmōnaþ; West Saxon: Ēastermōnaþ; Old High German: Ôstarmânoth), is the namesake of the festival of Easter. Ēostre is attested solely by Bede in his 8th-century work The Reckoning of Time, where Bede states that during Ēosturmōnaþ (the equivalent of April), pagan Anglo-Saxons had held feasts in Eostre's honor, but that this tradition had died out by his time, replaced by the Christian Paschal month, a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus.

By way of linguistic reconstruction, the matter of a goddess called *Austrō in the Proto-Germanic language has been examined in detail since the foundation of Germanic philology in the 19th century by scholar Jacob Grimm and others. As the Germanic languages descend from Proto-Indo-European (PIE), historical linguists have traced the name to a Proto-Indo-European goddess of the dawn *H₂ewsṓs (→ *Ausṓs), from which descends the Common Germanic divinity from whom Ēostre and Ostara are held to descend. Additionally, scholars have linked the goddess's name to a variety of Germanic personal names, a series of location names (toponyms) in England, and, discovered in 1958, over 150 2nd century BCE inscriptions referring to the matronae Austriahenae.