Aşağıpınar is a mound three kilometres south of Kırklareli, and what was found in it matters far beyond Thrace: the traces of the earliest farming communities to carry agriculture and village life from Anatolia into Thrace, some 8,200 years ago. The oldest cultural layer reached so far dates to around 6200 BC — Late Neolithic in the Anatolian sequence, Neolithic Karanovo II in the Balkan one — and it marks the beginning of a Thracian culture that would run on until the Iron Age, around 1200 BC.
The settlement lasted about two thousand years and was abandoned roughly 6,200 years ago. Its position was shaped by water: the freshwater spring northwest of the mound once lay further east, on the Haydardere bed, and shifted west over time, with a small pool and marsh in front of it.
Excavation has run without a break since 1993, every July and August, begun by the Ministry of Culture with the German Archaeological Institutes and Istanbul University and joined by Bulgarian, Slovak and Spanish researchers. The site is a first-degree archaeological protected area. Exhibition buildings have been moved here from the village of Ahmetler; the original finds are held at the Kırklareli Archaeology Museum.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Kırklareli as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 3 °C in January to 23.9 °C in July; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, July, August and September; rainfall is heaviest in December (70 mm) and lightest in August (21 mm). Long-term means for 1959-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
