Kırklareli is one of Türkiye's five provinces on the European continent, with Bulgaria to the north, Edirne to the west, the Black Sea and İstanbul to the east and Tekirdağ to the south. It has been settled since prehistory, and the documents recovered show dense habitation from the Neolithic — around 6000 BC — through the Chalcolithic, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age.
The local Thracian communities did not form a political union in the early period, and in later centuries they carried on as independent feudal lordships or city states. Scythian raids from the north and Greek cultural pressure from the south never let up, and from much further away the Persian king Darius held the region for a time from 513 BC.
