Kiten

Every lover of romantic travel likes to be familiar with the destination he / she intends to visit. To be prepared for wonderful emotions and hopes for an unforgettable vacation, we have tried to provide you with brief but yet meaningful information about our beautiful city. Read it, visit us and you will be delighted.

Town history

The resort village Kiten is situated in the southeastern part of Bulgaria, on the Black sea coast, 55km south east of the center of the region - the town of Bourgas, 5km south of the municipal center Primosko and 12km northwest of the center of the neighbour municipality – Tzarevo. The resort lies to the north of the mouth of the river Karaagach (The Kitenska river) and part of it on the peninsula Urdoviza.

Its shores are sheer and 10-15m high. The peninsula is about 120m long and 60-80m wide. The strip of land that joins it with the continent looks like a neck and is very narrow – no more than 40m. Now a great part of the town resort spreads out of the peninsula. The settled area is 1450 decares and its whole territory is 17100 decares. The history of the resort is very ancient. Right next to the today`s town Kiten you may see the ruins of the Urdoviza fortress, located on the Black Sea peninsula of the same name, 35km away from Sozopol. The name Urdoviza has its roots in the remote Bronze Age, comes from the ancient Thrace. It is an old Thracian settlement, which is confirmed by the plentiful finds of antique, stone anchors and pottery from the end of the Bronze Age, and namely archaic, classic and Hellenistic packing pottery (mainly amphora fragments) and fragments of red-glazed Roman vessels, found of the two bays round the peninsula. Nowadays you may still see remains of the fortress wall, which was blocking the peninsula of the mainland side. At the end of the 19th century the wall of the Urdoviza was very well preserved.

The legend about Kiten

The resort village Kiten is situated in one of the most famous and attractive spots on the Southern Black Sea coast, where the wooded Strandja’s spurs look at themselves in the clear sea depths. Very romantic is the picturesque nature beauty and the two comfortable, cozy beaches: the northern – Atliman and the southern – Karaagach. Between them, a peninsula with the mystic name Urdoviza, cuts deep into the sea. Up till the Bulgarian Liberation (1878) on the east end of the cape, over the rocky seacoast, was rising the wall of a fortress. This village-fortress goes back quite a long way. But who was its ruler, what was its end – nobody can say anything. Only the legends and the folk songs in this region tell us about it. They associate the village with the establishing of the area Hasekiyata as a privileged region during the Ottoman yoke. What is even more curious, is that on everybody’s lips is the name of one Bulgarian girl, whose fame was spreading for centuries from mouth to mouth among the local people thanks to her patriotism and self-sacrifice. This happened in the first years of the Ottoman conquest of Bulgaria. In the village-fortress Urdoviza one girl named Stana Urdovizka /as it is called in the people’s songs/ became famous for its beauty. The young woman was so pretty that she fascinated even the Ottoman sultan, he had no second thoughts and sent an army to bring the lovely Bulgarian girl to him. The sultan offered her to marry him and in one moment the eyes of the beauty, which were full of tears, glimmered with hope. She said to the sultan she will marry him but on one condition: to free of the sultan‘s taxes and duties the land of her birth that one horseman on a courser could manage to detour from sunrise till sunset. For the ruler of vast territories this wish was easy to fulfill and he gave his consent.
And that is how, in one early morning Urdovizka started from the peninsula on a courser, set out southwestwards in the direction of the Goshelek height, went down to Veleka on the opposite bank of the river. Then she turned westwards, upstream of the river, towards the adverse slopes. She rode all day long through the wooded hills of Strandja mountain, through dingles and hollows. The horse continuously bathed in a white lather. At dusk, after she went round the villages – Urdoviza, Urgari (Bulgari), Marzevo (Kondolovo), Gramatikovo, Zabernovo, Etika Stoilovo, Kolovo konak (Byala voda), Gyok tepe (Zvezden), Sarmotnik (Brashlyan) and several more in west direction, the young woman spurred her horse along the wooded Strandja ridge named Bosna-Urgash-Hadjiikata towards the Black Sea coast. But when she reached the bay north of Urdoviza, the horse fell down overtired and died. The beautiful girl from Urdoviza died too. From then on the people call the bay Atliman (the Bay of the Horse)

The issued on this occasion special sultan’s firman exempted the population from all taxes and duties. This region was called Hasekiyata or Asekiya. The Hasekiyan people enjoyed these privileges towards the first half of the 19th century.

One of the theories is that this was the last blocked port, which exported supplies for Troya while under siege.
You can still see remains of the ancient fortress Urdoviza – guard against pirates and bandits. The first name of the resort village was Urdoviza called after the name of Stana Urdovizka - a beautiful Bulgarian woman, coveted by the Sultan. She managed to free from tax the whole Strandja (large Bulgarian region). She and her horse met their death at the Northern Bay of Kiten, which bears the name Atliman /or the Bay of the Horse/. This is a wonderful, always peaceful and quiet bay.

Kiten is founded by settlers from Eastern Thrace (Edirne region) in 1932. One famous agronomist from the town of Vasiliko (Tzarevo), named Pencho Krotkov gave the present name of the town – Kiten (which means lovely, pretty, colorful), because when seen from a distance the houses in the village looked like a bunch of flowers. But the historical roots of the village extend way back into more ancient times, which is proved by the amphoras and vessels from the 6th century BC, found at the South beach.