Arbanassi is a surreal dream village that retains vestiges of what it must have been like in the Balkans hundreds of years ago. The high walls of the village's houses and courtyards rise to make its pot-holed streets feel like alleys. Its tiny square, where a wedding was taking place in a nearby tavern when I was there recently, isn't paved over like so many others in Bulgaria. Lastly, the view Arbanassi affords of Veliko Turnovo and the church atop Tsarevets might as well be a vision out of a fairy tale.

But it is changing. I saw at least four hotels being built, many in enormous houses that mimic Arbanassi's architectural style but are much larger, the same way American moguls often construct Georgian mansions that simultaneously ape and dwarf their English models. In the next few years, Arbanassi will be like Koprivshtitsa. Preserved, but at the price of being a bit sanitised, or presentable, for tourists, usually foreigners.

We stayed in the Bolyari Hotel on Gurko Street in Veliko Turnovo. Located next to the Archeological Museum, the hotel was clean, sported brand new fixtures and offered sweeping balcony views of the Yantra River gorge. A double cost 80 leva a night. We were both surprised by the hefty price of the Bolyari and the fact that we were so eager to pay it.

We tried three or four hotels that night in the centre of Veliko Turnovo. None had vacant rooms except for a hostel next to Hotel Gurko. The hostel cost 50 leva a night and was clean, but its rooms didn't have their own toilets. Usually when travelling in Bulgaria, I travel first and think about accomodations later. You can't do that so easily in Veliko Turnovo these days. With a Best Western Hotel and others setting up shop in the city, a lack of planning may result in paying through the nose.

From Turnovo we took a 15-leva taxi ride to Arbanassi. The driver dropped us off in the town square at the entrance to the village, leaving us his business card so that we could call him by mobile phone when we wanted him to fetch us. We ate in The Spider, a wonderful restaurant where we tried mushroom soup, frogs legs and lamb shank for a total of around 25 leva.

Suitably nourished, we saw the sights. First, we visited Todor Zhivkov's local residence, from where, like many of his houses built around what was then the People's Republic of Bulgaria, he could overlook his dominion. The spirit of autocracy still rules at the residence, which is now a hotel. A security guard emerged from its door and glared at us until we moved on.

Next we checked out the Kostantsaliev House, a mansion dating from the early 19th century when Arbanassi's merchants were growing fat from farming and trade. The house, like those in Plovdiv, gives you an idea how the rich lived back when Bulgaria was the workhorse of the Ottoman Empire. Enormous rooms where the entire family and colleagues would meet, bedrooms where the whole family slept, a separate office-like room for the man of the house.

Meanwhile, with no ground-floor windows and a monstrous, thick door covered in iron bands and rivets, we noted how the house could become a mini fortress in case bandits happened to drop by to abscond some of the village's wealth. The house's entrance fee was two leva.

The highlight of Arbanassi was the Church of the Nativity. Built in the 17th century, the church from the outside looks like a storage shed - it's a long, crumbling brick building with concrete flying buttresses evidently put up in the last fifty years or so to keep it from falling apart. The outside belies the utterly the inside, however. For a charge of two leva, you can see amazing frescoes depicting the Last Judgment, Greek philosophers - for Arbanassi was founded as a Greek town - and centuries-old inscriptions in Greek.

Transporting us back in time most in Arbanassi, however, was Kokona Fountain, built in 1786. Strolling around the village streets on an unseasonably warm winter day, having visited old houses and churches, one sensed history. But then coming upon a spectacular, public marble fountain built in the Ottoman era, and then bending unconsciously to slake one's thirst with its waters, where others made the same gestures centuries ago, felt like being part of history.

Unfortunately, the fountain wasn't working. We had to settle for studying it as a piece of art, which turns out is only half as far as one needs to really experience the fountain's full power. On the fountain an Ottoman inscription reads, according to my guidebook: "He who looks upon me and drinks my water shall possess the light of the eyes and of the soul."
So no light of the eyes and soul. Just memories of a dreamy day.