Trapezitsa - Трапезица in Bulgarian - has at least three plausible etymologies. It could come from trapeza, a word for table or banquet that fits the flat-topped plateau. It could come from trapezium, a geometric word that fits the shape. The most likely origin is trapezits, a term for the soldiers who guarded mountain passes - the kind of men who first occupied the hill in the early Middle Ages. The hill rises about eighty-one metres above the Yantra. The protected area runs roughly 470 metres north to south by 300 metres east to west, totalling around 6.6 hectares enclosed by a six-metre crushed-stone wall. Four entrances pierced that wall. The main one stood on the southeast and connected to Tsarevets by a bridge over the Yantra - a span that emerged opposite the Holy Forty Martyrs Church, where Bulgaria's Tsar Ivan Asen II would later commemorate his battlefield victories on engraved columns.

What makes Trapezitsa unusual among Balkan fortresses is the density of churches packed onto its plateau. Archaeologists have identified the foundations of at least seventeen, and ongoing excavations may push the count higher. Most date from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the height of the Second Bulgarian Empire. They were lavishly decorated for their size: pilasters, niches, blind arches, and rows of glazed clay plates in green and yellow studding the exteriors; mosaics and frescoes inside. Church No. 16 is the earliest, going back to the late tenth century, before this place was anyone's capital. Church No. 5 from the Asen dynasty period preserves Trapezitsa's only surviving mosaic floor. Several churches contain burial vaults and are known as the tomb churches. Others, identified by royal portraits in their frescoes, are called the royal churches - though it is the boyars who lived around them whose families they likely served. In 1195, Tsar Ivan Asen I had the relics of St. Ivan Rilski - Bulgaria's most beloved hermit-saint - moved to a church on Trapezitsa, and a monastery grew up around them. Tsar Kaloyan brought the relics of St. Gabriel of Lesnovo here a few years later. For a century, this was a hill where saints lay among the houses of nobles.

The Ottoman army arrived at Veliko Tarnovo in 1393. The siege lasted three months. When Tsarevets fell on 17 July, Trapezitsa fell with it. The conquest of the capital effectively ended the Second Bulgarian Empire as a political entity, and contemporary Bulgarian sources describe what followed in terms that have not softened with time: the boyars who survived the assault were assembled and executed in the Holy Forty Martyrs Church, the same building the bridge from Trapezitsa had once led to. The churches on the hill burned. The frescoes inside them, which had drawn pilgrims for two hundred years, were lost beyond the fragments archaeologists would later recover. The relics of St. Ivan Rilski were moved by surviving monks - eventually reaching the Rila Monastery deep in the Rila Mountains, where they remain today. The hill itself was never resettled in the same way. For five centuries it sat above the Yantra under Ottoman rule, the church foundations grown over with grass, the boyars' houses gone to ruin and memory.

After the Liberation of Bulgaria in 1878, the historian Marin Drinov - a Kharkiv University professor who became commissioner for education in the new state - led the first archaeological work here, alongside Vasil Beron of the Tarnovo Archaeological Society. Their excavations between 1879 and 1884 uncovered the foundations of seventeen churches. The French archaeologist Georges Sor returned to dig in 1900. Comprehensive systematic excavation, however, has only happened in this century: from 2008 to 2015 a major Bulgarian campaign restored the south tower and reconstructed several churches in their original footprints. Walking the plateau today, you can trace those footprints in cut stone - small naves, semicircular apses, doorways now opening onto sky - while across the gorge the Sound and Light show on Tsarevets bathes the cliffs of both hills in red and white. The two citadels still answer each other across the river, even if one of them speaks mostly through ruins now.