A place to remember and a place to return to. I have been there seven times already and I don't feel I am done with it. A precious view of my home country of Bulgaria, one that I found for myself and instantly fell in love with maybe ten years ago.

And I have now visited it in each season. Is that enough? No, not yet. Not when it comes to my passion for photography and my wish to show the spot in its best light. Well, best light is so relative. Still, I have to wait for it. Long off-topic story short - real landscape photographers sometimes wait for weeks or months for the "lucky" shot in beautiful weather conditions. Still, I feel, I have to try. Again.

Meanwhile, let me tell you about it...

When I speak of Rozhen Sand Pyramids I speak also of a visit to Melnik and vice versa. It is the smallest town in Bulgaria with population less than a few hundred, the town itself huddled between sandy, almost vertical slopes. It feels like a dry and warm place generally. It actually falls in a small stretch of Mediterranean climate zone - different than all the rest of Bulgaria.

I have written about Melnik in a few stories more than a month ago but this one would be incomplete if I do not summarize those here. They were mostly about my two latest trips to the region, my sixth and seventh visits. Both as the organizer of small photo workshops.

Just a few glimpses back at those stories with maybe a few new photos among those already seen on my blog:

Time standing still in the abandoned high school building which could still serve as a memorial to the communist regime...

Melnik's Architecture...

The old Townhall building before it was covered on the front side.

The gathering of the grapes from which Melnik's boutique wine is being made...

And now, after those of which you could read more in past articles of mine, welcome to...

That Small and Twisted Oak Tree on the Edge

... and its neighborhood.

To get there you have two options.

The easy one - follow the road to the parking lot near the Rozhen Monastery and then walk up a path for about twenty minutes. The road itself goes continuously up and bends around some great sandy cliffs standing like giant spires reaching up from the forest floor. It becomes quite steep after the last small settlement which is about ten kilometers from the town where you started.

There is a church even outside the monastery, a few hundred meters down the road.

The slightly harder one - walk from Melnik on a path through the forest.

I lost my way on my first attempt, actually. Because I did not see the markings of a tree and continued following what seemed like a dry river bed. Until I got to a place where i had to crouch, duck, bend... and then disentangle from the brambles.

If you see the path starting to climb a hill, though, everything's fine. And soon you will reach the vista. The one I spend many hours on, with or without company. The one I return to.

Some photos are old enough so that I could not find them on my active hard drives so I downloaded them from old profiles of mine all over the Great Onlines

Yes, this one, too. I spent some hours without water on my first visit there. But the colors...