[size=75:2aap1mzj]Sofia echo 28 February 2010

British-Bulgarian team to renew archaeological digs at Nicopolis

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A British-Bulgarian team will renew archaeological digs in Veliko Turnovo region of Bulgaria in 2010, the head of the town's history museum Ivan Tsurov said, as quoted by Bulgarian news agency Focus.

The team will focus on the remains of a small fortress near the village of Dobri Dyal, with two more locations to be explored, Tsurov said. The team is expected to find more artifacts from the fifth and sixth centuries CE, when Nicopolis ad Istrum was destroyed by Attila's Huns and then rebuilt.

"
We have discussed some of the issues raised by this expedition with Andrew Poulter, whom I believe a lot of people in Turnovo and the region know. He has been digging here for 25 years and the village of Nikyup is his favourite place in Bulgaria,"
Tsurov was quoted as saying.

Poulter is a professor in the department of archaeology at the University of Nottingham and a coresponding member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. He was part of the team that carried out excavations at the site of Nicopolis ad Istrum, near the village of Nikyup, in 1985/92.

According to Poulter's staff page at the University of Nottingham, the third large-scale archaeological excavations of Nicopolis would "
investigate this last period in the history of early Byzantine control on the lower Danube, defining how the region passed into its 'Dark Age' from which emerged the First Bulgarian Kingdom during the second half of the seventh century."