---
title: "A Bulgarian Temple Kept Burning Incense to Cybele 60 Years After Rome Outlawed It"
description: "A marble relief and a burned sanctuary near Ivaylovgrad show how long Thracian pagan worship outlasted imperial law"
author: "Luis Goa"
published: 2026-10-21T22:14:37Z
modified: 2026-10-22T01:42:35Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/a-bulgarian-temple-kept-burning-incense-to-cybele-60-years-a-6933c6
language: en
tags: ["archaeology", "history", "religion", "bulgaria", "thrace", "europe"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# A Bulgarian Temple Kept Burning Incense to Cybele 60 Years After Rome Outlawed It

*A marble relief and a burned sanctuary near Ivaylovgrad show how long Thracian pagan worship outlasted imperial law*

By Luis Goa · October 21, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/a-bulgarian-temple-kept-burning-incense-to-cybele-60-years-a-6933c6

## In brief

- A 15-meter pagan temple at Balak Dere near Ivaylovgrad, Bulgaria, was built around the 3rd century AD and burned in the mid-5th century
- The 2026 excavation season, led by Ivaylo Kanev of Bulgaria’s National Museum of History, concluded in October
- A marble relief shows the goddess Cybele with three nymphs, a combination excavators say is undocumented elsewhere
- A water channel around the temple and its position by the Arda River suggest it may have served as a nymphaeum
- Emperor Theodosius I’s 392 AD edict banned pagan sacrifice empire-wide roughly six decades before the temple burned

A pagan temple on the Arda River in southeastern Bulgaria was built around the third century AD and burned down roughly a century and a half later, in the middle of the fifth century. In between, in November 392, Emperor Theodosius I issued the decree that banned animal sacrifice, incense offerings and even entering a temple anywhere in the Roman Empire, under threat of confiscated property (the law survives as Codex Theodosianus 16.10.12, translated at earlychurchtexts.com). If the site’s own dating holds, the sanctuary kept operating for something like six decades after that ban became law, which is the real finding here: not that a temple existed, but how slowly an edict written in Milan reorganized worship out in the Rhodope foothills.

The site is Balak Dere, near the village of Huhla in Ivaylovgrad municipality, in the Eastern Rhodope Mountains close to the modern border with Greece and Turkey. Bulgaria’s National Museum of History has excavated it on and off since 2004, and this year’s season, which wrapped up in October, was led by the museum’s chief curator, Ivaylo Kanev. The dig was financed entirely through a Ministry of Culture project with additional support from Ivaylovgrad municipality, according to [Bulgaria’s national news agency BTA](https://www.bta.bg/bg/news/lik/1227852-arheolozi-razkriha-kasnoantichen-ezicheski-hram-i-mramoren-relef-kray-ivaylovgra). The find that made this season notable, as [reported by arkeonews.net](https://arkeonews.net/rare-relief-of-cybele-and-three-nymphs-discovered-in-one-of-ancient-thraces-last-pagan-temples/), is a marble relief carved with the mother goddess Cybele standing alongside three nymphs, plus new architectural evidence for how the building functioned and when it stopped.

## Three rooms on one line

The temple measures 15 meters end to end, an unusual trapezoidal footprint oriented southeast to northwest, with three interconnected rooms. The largest holds an altar. The middle room contains what excavators interpret as a sacrificial table. The third, smallest room appears to have stored votive offerings. According to the museum’s own account of the season, published at [historymuseum.org](https://historymuseum.org/last-thracian-temple/), having all three canonical elements of pagan cult architecture arranged along a single axis, in one building, is itself notable: the museum calls it the first documented case of that arrangement in a Late Antique urban-context sanctuary built before the fifth century. That is the excavators’ own claim about the significance of their find, not an independently audited survey of comparable sites, and it should be read with that caveat.

**How the temple's three rooms worked** Interpreted ritual sequence through the 15-meter Balak Dere sanctuary

| From | To | How |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Entrance *(southeast end)* | Largest chamber *(altar)* | worship |
| Largest chamber *(altar)* | Central room *(sacrificial table)* | sacrifice |
| Central room *(sacrificial table)* | Third room *(offering storage)* | deposit offerings |

![How the temple's three rooms worked. Interpreted ritual sequence through the 15-meter Balak Dere sanctuary](https://rews.cc/img/07db41468fa7f808e378b30d8614bd9ae0df4f6e.webp)

Based on [National Museum of History, Bulgaria](https://historymuseum.org/last-thracian-temple/)

## A mother goddess among river spirits

Cybele’s cult began in Phrygia, in what is now central Turkey, where she was worshipped as a mountain and mother goddess tied to fertility and protection; Greek and then Roman communities adopted her over the following centuries, each grafting on local practice. Nymphs are a different, older category of divinity in Greek and Thracian belief: minor deities attached to a specific spring, river or grove rather than to an empire-wide cult. Putting the two on one relief, a mother goddess from Anatolia next to three local water spirits, is a combination the excavation team says it has not seen documented before in the archaeological record. That claim rests on the excavators’ own familiarity with comparable material rather than a published catalogue check, so it is worth treating as a working assessment rather than a settled fact until it is peer-reviewed.

The architectural evidence for why the two deities might appear together is more concrete: archaeologists found a water channel running around the entire temple, and the building sits close to the Arda River itself. Those two facts together are why the excavation team proposes, as a preliminary hypothesis rather than a conclusion, that the complex functioned as a nymphaeum, a shrine built specifically around a water source and dedicated to its resident nymphs, with Cybele worship folded into the same sacred space rather than occupying a separate building.

## A ban the sanctuary outlived

The edicts of 391 and 392 did not arrive out of nowhere; they capped a decade of tightening imperial religious policy that moved from taxing temples to banning sacrifice outright, a progression documented in detail on [Wikipedia’s account of the persecution of pagans under Theodosius](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_pagans_under_Theodosius_I). What the Balak Dere evidence adds is a data point on enforcement lag at the provincial edge of the empire: a law written for Rome, Milan and Constantinople took, on this one site’s dating, on the order of sixty years to catch up with a rural sanctuary in Western Thrace, if it ever formally caught up at all rather than simply being overtaken by a fire.

![Smoke curls from a small incense bowl on a stone altar inside ancient ruins overlooking a hilly landscape with cypress trees and a distant classical city.](https://rews.cc/img/6675344e9a29c238040bdf429d6141d588fb1ca8.webp)

That fire is where the museum’s public statement and the archaeological caution diverge. The National Museum of History’s own account frames the mid-fifth-century blaze as the consequence of harsh sanctions against a community that kept worshipping its old gods after the ban, implying an act of deliberate suppression. The arkeonews.net account of the same excavation is more guarded: the evidence establishes that a major fire destroyed the complex around the middle of the fifth century, but it does not establish who set it or whether religious violence, rather than accident, war, or something else entirely, was the cause. A press release and a field report describing the identical ash layer have produced two different stories about intent, and only one of them is backed by evidence the museum has actually published.

## Ten centuries under one hill

The temple is one layer in an occupation sequence that the National Museum of History and prior surveys have traced from the third to the thirteenth century AD at Balak Dere, a position on a route between the Thracian interior and the Edirne region that made the site worth reoccupying even after disaster. A fortified settlement developed there in the sixth century, was destroyed in the early seventh century in incursions researchers attribute to Slavic and Avar groups, then sat unoccupied for roughly three centuries before activity resumed in the tenth century, including what excavators read as a Bulgarian military presence during the reign of Tsar Simeon I. Finds from that medieval phase include belt fittings, coins, bells and a lead amulet carrying a Cyrillic inscription, evidence that whatever sanctity the hill held for Cybele’s worshippers was long gone by the time it became a Bulgarian garrison post.

**Balak Dere, layer by layer** Occupation phases at the site near Ivaylovgrad

| Period | Approx. date | What happened |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Temple founded | 3rd century AD | Pagan sanctuary built on the site |
| Imperial ban | 392 AD | Theodosius I outlaws sacrifice and temple worship empire-wide |
| Temple destroyed | mid-5th century AD | Complex burns; cause not established |
| Fortress built | 6th century AD | Fortified settlement develops at Balak Dere |
| Fortress destroyed | early 7th century AD | Attributed to Slavic and Avar incursions |
| Reoccupation | 10th century AD | Possible Bulgarian garrison under Tsar Simeon I |
| Excavations begin | 2004 | National Museum of History starts work at the site |
| Latest season | October 2026 | Cybele-and-nymphs relief and temple layout documented |

Source: [National Museum of History, Bulgaria](https://historymuseum.org/last-thracian-temple/)

None of this settles whether Balak Dere was actually among the last functioning Thracian pagan temples, as the excavators suggest, or simply one of several such holdouts still being dug up piecemeal across the former empire’s provinces. Confirming the stronger claim would need an independently dated ash layer, a comparison against the handful of other Late Antique rural sanctuaries known in the Rhodopes, and some account of who was still lighting the altar fire sixty years into a ban that, on paper, had already ended their religion.

## See also

- [Archaeologists uncover possible last Thracian pagan temple in Bulgaria](https://artdaily.com/news/201427/Archaeologists-uncover-possible-last-Thracian-pagan-temple-in-Bulgaria) — artdaily.com · Independent English-language report on the same excavation
- [Codex Theodosianus 16.10, translated](https://earlychurchtexts.com/public/codex_theodosianus.htm) — earlychurchtexts.com · Primary text of the laws banning pagan sacrifice and temple worship