This work is dedicated to efforts to seek a perspective specific to ethnographic science on the study of the phenomenon of the "city," starting from the accumulation of knowledge about specific cities. As real, named objects, cities are attractive to ethnographers in terms of their emergence, duration, place in the settlement system, typology, and assessment from the point of view of their changing significance in an ethnic territory that is also subject to change. The work consists of studies, articles, and two appendices. The titles presented in the collection can be divided into sections according to their thematic focus. The first section includes studies which, based on examples of specific cities, present the phenomenon of the "city" in the Bulgarian lands in its historical continuity from ancient times to the Renaissance. The unifying theme of the first section is the author's understanding that by presenting sources on the city from biblical times through medieval authors to the Renaissance, he offers a chronological horizon for the ethnographic study of the city in our lands. Each of the studies reveals the possibilities of different types of sources for studying the city from an ethnographic point of view. This part of the work attempts to compensate for the lack of empirical data on historical ethnography by resorting to sources of various kinds - written, archaeological, cartographic, as well as sources typical for ethnography, collected through observation of the object and drawing on knowledge from oral accounts.