Gabrovo is the town where the Balkan Mountains begin to rise in earnest, strung along the narrow valley of the Yantra River in central Bulgaria, and it is best known for a joke. The town has a reputation, among Bulgarians, for thrift, and the legends of its stinginess have produced a whole genre of humour. The House of Humour and Satire, a museum devoted to it, is one of the stranger attractions in the country, and the town holds a biennial carnival of humour. Locals take the whole thing with good grace, and a visitor who tells a thrift joke will probably be rewarded with a better one.
Behind the jokes lies a history of industry. Gabrovo was an early centre of textile manufacturing in the Ottoman era and the first Bulgarian town to have a secular school, and its craftsmen and merchants were prominent in the national revival of the nineteenth century. A few kilometres to the south, the Etar Architectural-Ethnographic Complex is an open-air museum where craftsmen work in water-powered workshops and demonstrate traditional crafts in a collection of old houses.
For riders, Gabrovo is the doorway to the Shipka Pass, one of the best-known mountain roads in Bulgaria. The road climbs south from town through beech forest, crosses the main ridge of the Balkan at about 1,185 metres, and descends into the Valley of the Roses near Kazanlak, with plenty of bends and a surface that is generally good. At the top, a huge stone monument stands on Stoletov Peak, commemorating the fierce battles of 1877 and 1878, when Russian and Bulgarian volunteers held the pass against Ottoman forces in the war that led to Bulgaria's liberation. A steep staircase leads to the memorial, and the view over the mountains is wide. The pass can be icy or snowy in winter, and fog sometimes sits in the beech forest, so check conditions before you go.
Gabrovo has more than sixty thousand people, so fuel, food and accommodation are no problem. Tryavna, thirteen kilometres to the south-west, is a lovely old town of wooden houses and cobbled lanes that deserves an hour, and the road toward it is fun.
Try a bowl of shopska salad and some grilled meat in a mehana, a traditional tavern, and finish with Bulgarian rakia.