Petrich

Petrich is a town in Blagoevgrad Province in southwestern Bulgaria and the seat of Petrich Municipality. It lies in the Strumeshnitsa Valley, in the Sandanski-Petrich Valley at the foot of the Belasica Mountains, close to the borders with Greece and North Macedonia; the crossing into North Macedonia is known as Novo Selo-Petrich. Local historians regard the present town as heir to an ancient Thracian settlement of the Medi tribe near Kozhuh hill, later a Roman fortress probably called Petra and burned by Slavs in the sixth century, although more recent excavations show a gap of several centuries between that city and modern Petrich, whose earliest settlements on the site appear only in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The Petrich region was annexed to the Bulgarian state in 837, and in 1014 the decisive battle between Tsar Samuel and the Byzantine emperor Basil II was fought in the Kleidion gorge not far from today's town. Petrich was included in Bulgaria after the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, and in October 1925 it was the site of a brief conflict with Greece sometimes called the War of the Stray Dog.