---
title: "Perperikon’s Excavator Says the Rock City’s Lost Name Was Pergamon, Like the Famous One"
description: "Nikolay Ovcharov uses corrected Ptolemy coordinates and old maps to back a 20-year-old theory, but no inscription has confirmed it yet"
author: "Nate Ledger"
published: 2026-10-12T14:38:43Z
modified: 2026-10-12T16:54:16Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/perperikon-s-excavator-says-the-rock-city-s-lost-name-was-pe-600368
language: en
tags: ["archaeology", "history", "bulgaria", "perperikon", "ptolemy", "europe"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Perperikon’s Excavator Says the Rock City’s Lost Name Was Pergamon, Like the Famous One

*Nikolay Ovcharov uses corrected Ptolemy coordinates and old maps to back a 20-year-old theory, but no inscription has confirmed it yet*

By Nate Ledger · October 12, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/perperikon-s-excavator-says-the-rock-city-s-lost-name-was-pe-600368

## In brief

- Archaeologist Nikolay Ovcharov argues Perperikon’s ancient name was Pergamon, an idea he first proposed twenty years ago
- He relies on corrected coordinates from Ptolemy’s second-century Geography, which put a Pergamon in Inner Thrace near the Arda River
- Maps from 1585 to 1801 place Pergamon in the Rhodopes, though all of them draw on Ptolemy
- The 2026 season found three more circular mausoleums, bringing the total to twelve, plus a 4th-century monumental building
- Finds include a seal of Byzantine empress Irene Komnene Laskarina; no inscription has confirmed the Pergamon name

Perperikon, the rock-cut city in Bulgaria’s Eastern Rhodopes near Kardzhali, is one of the most thoroughly excavated ancient sites in the country. It has monumental buildings, elaborate tombs and plenty of evidence that people there had money in the Roman period. What it doesn’t have is a name, or at least the name its residents used nearly 2,000 years ago. Nobody has found a stone that says “Welcome to \_\_\_.” So the city’s identity in ancient written records is still an open question.

Prof. Nikolay Ovcharov, who leads the excavations, has a candidate: Pergamon, also written Pergamos or Pergamum. He first suggested it twenty years ago, when much of the site’s Roman history was still underground. Now, [as Arkeonews reports](https://arkeonews.net/bulgarias-ancient-rock-cut-city-may-have-shared-its-name-with-a-famous-city-in-anatolia/), he says the excavated remains and a closer look at historical maps make the case much stronger. Bulgarian outlets covered [the announcement on October 9](https://www.novjivot.info/2026/10/09/nikolay-ovcharov-obyavi-nai-staroto-ime-na-perperikon/344661/).

## A dot on a warped map

The evidence starts with a dataset from the second century. Claudius Ptolemy’s *Geography* lists thousands of places across the known world and tries to pin each one down with coordinates. One entry is a settlement called Pergamon in Inner Thrace. The difficulty is that Ptolemy’s numbers don’t line up with ours. His zero meridian \[ran through the Fortunate Isles\](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography\_(Ptolemy)) in the Atlantic, not through Greenwich. On top of that, the coordinates that survive are distorted. So a dot on his map is not a dot on a modern map, and you can’t simply type it into a GPS.

![A vintage-style map depicts forested hills, a winding road leading to a hilltop temple, curved grid lines, and a red marker.](https://rews.cc/img/16ff74489bba36deb870e46831d0cf16fd517311.webp)

The fix is a little like calibrating an instrument. You take places whose real locations you already know, compare them with where Ptolemy put them, work out how his map is bent, and then apply the same correction to the places you don’t know. Ovcharov points to work linked to the Technical University of Berlin and to a project Brady Kiesling launched in 2016. Kiesling’s English rendering of the *Geography* [is on ToposText](https://topostext.org/work/209), with many places geolocated. Ovcharov uses Philippopolis (modern Plovdiv) and Augusta Traiana (modern Stara Zagora) as fixed points. Measured against them, he says, Pergamon moves toward the middle course of the Arda River, which is where Perperikon stands. Bulgarian coverage [quoted him as saying](https://paragraf.bg/ovcharov-svarza-perperikon-s-pergamon-ot-kartite-na-ptolemej/) that the latest Berlin study places the ancient settlement in the Eastern Rhodopes between Zlatograd and Kardzhali.

So far, so good. Then comes the name, which is the fun part and also the awkward part.

## Same name, same kind of hill

The famous Pergamon is in western Anatolia. It was the capital of the Attalid Kingdom and one of the great cultural centres of the Hellenistic world. The two cities are hundreds of kilometres apart, but they were built on the same kind of ground. Anatolian Pergamon grew up around a steep, defensible hill topped by an acropolis. Perperikon sits on a commanding rocky height where people carved buildings and sacred spaces straight into the stone. Scholars tie the word Pergamon or Pergamos to pre-Greek languages, and some read it as meaning a fortress, a fortified height or an acropolis. Its exact origin is still debated.

I think this argument works in both directions. If “Pergamon” roughly means “the fortified hill,” it’s easy to see why two cities on fortified hills would share it. But Thrace had a lot of fortified hills. A name that describes the terrain explains the match, and it also makes it harder to say that this particular hill is the one Ptolemy meant. The coordinates have to carry most of the weight.

![An antique-style illustration shows stone ruins and a classical temple atop rocky hills, surrounded by cypress trees, winding valleys, and distant mountains.](https://rews.cc/img/92e949842e465a50fc25977bb182c4c78203ddd9.webp)

Ovcharov adds early modern maps. Abraham Ortelius in 1585, Johann Laurenberg in 1651 and André Male in 1683 all put Pergamon in the Rhodope region while reconstructing ancient geography from Ptolemy. The map he finds most interesting is from 1801. Joseph-Romain Joly, a cartographer at Napoleon’s headquarters, labelled the Arda River “Arpeskos” and marked Pergamon near its middle course, close to modern Kardzhali.

The obvious catch is that all these mapmakers were reading the same book. Their maps don’t confirm Ptolemy independently. They are Ptolemy, redrawn several times. Think of five analysts who all run the same model and reach the same price target: you’ve learned what the model says, not that it’s right. Ovcharov accepts that the maps don’t settle the location on their own. He still thinks it matters that they keep putting Pergamon in the Eastern Rhodopes, given what is coming out of the ground there.

## What is coming out of the ground

Quite a lot, it turns out. This year’s team spent four months in the Southern Quarter, in a funerary zone called the Area Sacra. They found three more circular mausoleums, dated between the third and sixth centuries AD. That brings the total to twelve monumental tombs, plus rock-cut graves and sarcophagi. In July, Bulgaria’s state news agency BTA [reported the eleventh](https://www.bta.bg/en/news/culture/1176270-archaeologists-discover-late-roman-mausoleum-at-perperikon), a Late Roman stone mausoleum built for a prominent citizen. Ovcharov calls the area a Roman via sepulchralis, a road lined with tombs, and compares it to the burial roads of Pompeii and the Appian Way outside Rome, where rich families competed over how to remember their dead. Twelve of these tombs suggests a wealthy city, not a hilltop village.

![Ancient circular stone ruins and rectangular foundations stand among shrubs and cypress trees beside a winding paved stone road.](https://rews.cc/img/d85e51c138f300f6301ea566769de9bf892d6319.webp)

Close to the tombs, the team started digging a previously unknown monumental building from the fourth century, the time of Constantine the Great’s successors. It is built of precisely dressed stone blocks, and the surviving entrance has a carefully shaped stone threshold. It stands twenty metres from an early Christian basilica almost forty metres long. Ovcharov thinks the bishops may have used it as a residence in the fifth and sixth centuries. Nobody has yet established what it was originally built for.

The 2026 season also turned up reliquary crosses, silver and bronze ornaments and several statuettes, on top of the [statue announced last month](https://rews.cc/a/at-perperikon-after-twenty-six-years-of-digging-the-mountain-5e30f7). Byzantine Christians often wore crosses like these around the neck, sometimes with tiny relics inside, as signs of faith and protection. One of the most important finds is a seal belonging to Irene Komnene Laskarina, wife of the 13th-century Byzantine emperor John III Doukas Vatatzes, which links the site to the imperial court. In the last days of the dig, the team also found an 11th-century bronze reliquary with an image of the Virgin Mary.

For Ovcharov, every extra mausoleum makes Perperikon look more like a city that would have earned an entry in Ptolemy. That’s a reasonable inference. It still isn’t an inscription, and no inscription has confirmed the identification. If the etymology holds, the ancient name was roughly “fortress,” which the site’s builders would have regarded less as a name than as an accurate description.