Old Bridge, Svilengrad

Mustafa Pasha Bridge or The Old Bridge is a 16th-century arch bridge over the Maritsa in Svilengrad, southern Bulgaria. It was built in 1529 on the order of the Ottoman vizier Çoban Mustafa Pasha. The bridge was the first major work designed by the Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan. The bridge is 295 m long, 6 m wide and has 20 or 21 arches. A flood destroyed some of the arches in 1766. Reconstruction was completed in 1809. The Ottoman army tried to destroy the bridge as it retreated from a Bulgarian advance after the Battle of Lule Burgas during the First Balkan War in November 1912. At Mustapha Pasha, twenty miles in front of Adrianople, was a solid old stone bridge over the Maritza whose floods in the winter rains would be a nightmare to engineers who had to maintain a crossing with pontoons. If ever a corps needed a bridge second Bulgarian corps needed this one. They found that a small and badly placed charge of dynamite had merely knocked out a few stones between two of the buttresses, leaving the bridge intact enough for all the armies of Europe to pass over it; and the Turks did not even put a mitrailleuse behind sandbags in the streets or use field guns from the adjacent hills to delay the Bulgars in their crossing. References and notes Other websites Media related to Mustafa Pasha Bridge at Wikimedia Commons