Стохълмието и неговите центрове
The One Hundred Mounds Area and Its Centres

Summary/Abstract: The author discusses the historical and archaeological data about the geographic location and the meaning of the district name “the One Hundred Mounds Area”. Correlating the written testimonies allows him to accept the opinion voiced earlier that this area is identical with the so-called “Karvuna Land”. In his view the two names have the same meaning – “a land with one hundred mounds (i.e. fortified places)”. The evidence found in the Bulgarian apocryphal chronicle makes it possible to establish two periods of its use: after the middle of the 5th century, when it was used most probably by the so-called Sagadarians (“inhabitants of one hundred fortifications”), and after the end of the 7th century, when it was inhabited by the Asperukh (alias Isperikh) Bulgarians – Ounogundurs. During the first period (the 5th to the 7th centuries) the one-hundred-mound-fortifications may be identified with the earthwork camps attached to the Great Dobrudja Fortified Earthwork Line, and the One Hundred Mounds Area - with the territory of the Mesogaion of the Province Scythia Minor. The Mesogaion was vacated after Constantine the Great. After the Asperukh Bulgarians came to the Balkans and after the formation of the Bulgarian state in 681 AD the Mesogaion expanded to the South West and covered the whole of Southern Dobrudja and at least a part of the area now called "Ludogorie". The valley of the River Sukha became its fortified axis. It was the administrative boundary between Scythia Minor and Moesia Secunda, which were included in full and permanently within the boundaries of the Bulgarian state. The “All-glorious Mound” mentioned in the Tarnovo inscription of Khan Omurtag was the main centre of the One Hundred Mounds Area. The mound was the main army centre of the state and its authentic Proto-Bulgarian name must have been Karvuna. That centre changed its location depending on the changes in the location of the state centres but until the first decades of the 9th century one can identify it consecutively with the following fortifications of Late Antiquity: Tilikion, the surroundings of Dryanovets, the unnamed fortification at the village of Voynikovo, and the more recent earthwork fortification at the village of Kladentsi. All these fortifications are in the area of the town of Dobrich. It is highly probable that in all cases the centre bore its traditional name of Karvuna. It seems that in the 9th-10th centuries it received the Slavonic name of Glavinitsa, which is mentioned by Anna Komnenos. After the so-called Karvuna Khora was established within the boundaries of the Second Bulgarian State, it included the One Hundred Mounds Area and its centre was probably a city or a fortress on the Black Sea shore, in all likelihood not far from the city of Varna. When the Dobrudja Despotate was established in the middle of the 14th century the old Proto-Bulgarian names were retained and even received a new lease of life and the name of Karvuna was given to its “capital” at Cape Kaliakra.

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