Venchan is a village in the Provadiya Municipality

Provadiya Municipality

Provadiya Municipality is a municipality in Varna Province, Northeastern Bulgaria. It is named after its administrative centre - the town of Provadiya....

, Varna Province, north-eastern Bulgaria

Bulgaria

Bulgaria , officially the Republic of Bulgaria , is a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional republic in Southeast Europe. The country borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east...

. It is situated at 7 km to the north-west of Provadiya

Provadiya

Provadia is a town in northeastern Bulgaria, part of Varna Province, located in a deep karst gorge along the Provadia River not far from the Bulgarian Black Sea Coast. It is the administrative centre of the homonymous Provadiya Municipality. As of December 2009, the town has a population of...

. As of 2007 the village has 364 inhabitants.

Venchan is among the oldest settlements in the surrounding area. There are remains of a Thracian necropolis dated to the 7th-6th centuries BC. The ruins of an antique and medieval fortress. In 1388 the fortress was seized after a fierce resistance by a 30,000-strong Ottoman during a major campaign against the Bulgarian Empire

Second Bulgarian Empire

The Second Bulgarian Empire was a medieval Bulgarian state which existed between 1185 and 1396 . A successor of the First Bulgarian Empire, it reached the peak of its power under Kaloyan and Ivan Asen II before gradually being conquered by the Ottomans in the late 14th-early 15th century...

 and the settlement was occupied by the Ottomans. The construction of the railway between Ruse and Varna

Varna

Varna is the largest city and seaside resort on the Bulgarian Black Sea Coast and third-largest in Bulgaria after Sofia and Plovdiv, with a population of 334,870 inhabitants according to Census 2011...

in 1866 which passed through the village and brought some economic prosperity.