Plovdiv Province Plovdiv Province Plovdiv Province (: "Oblast Plovdiv", former name Plovdiv okrug) is a province in central southern Bulgaria. It comprises 18 municipalities (общини, "obshtini", sing. общинa, "obshtina") on a territory of 5,972.9 km² with a population, as of February 2011, of 683,027 inhabitants. The province is named after its administrative and industrial centre — the city of Plovdiv. Plovdiv Province includes parts of the Upper Thracian Plain, the Rhodopes, Sredna Gora, the Sub-Balkan valleys and Stara Planina, including its highest peak, Botev (2,376m). The main rivers in the province are Maritsa, Stryama, Pyasachnik. There are numerous dams, the most important
Church of the Holy Mother of God, Plovdiv 10 January 1860 the bishop of Plovdiv Paisius held a service in Bulgarian language and publicly announced that his congregation denounced the Greek Patriarch of Istanbul which became a great scandal and Plovdiv became the most radical center for the struggle of the autonomy of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. On 30 April Paisius organized a Church and People's counsel in which the citizens were also represented in order to discuss the church question. Plovdiv sent a delegation to the Ottoman government asking officially for an autonomous Church. That Counsel was held annually until 1870 when the Bulgarian Exarchate was recognized