Archaeological Museum

Worth a detour

Everything a visitor will go on to see along this coast — Sozopol, Nesebar, Pomorie, Deultum — was excavated by this museum, and the best of what came out is here rather than there. An hour spent in it before you drive south will change what you notice in the old towns. It is on the pedestrian street, open daily, and costs about €3.

Story

Background

The exposition covers the Burgas region from prehistory to the end of the fourteenth century: Thracian material, the Greek colonies along the bay, Roman Deultum and the Byzantine and medieval coast. Among the named pieces are the ornaments of the Thracian priestess Leseskepra, a wooden Roman coffin, and a monoxylon — a boat cut from a single trunk. The collection of pre-monetary forms, the objects that served as money before coinage, is one of the fullest in the country and on the Balkans.

The other strand is the sea itself: stone anchors, ship fittings and cargo recovered from the bay, and a section on the medieval ports of the coast up to the Ottoman conquest. It is an unusual emphasis for a Bulgarian museum and the most locally specific thing in the building.

The museum occupies a school building of the 1890s on Aleko Bogoridi, which at the time was a statement of what the new port town thought of itself. Two floors, an hour to see properly, and it sits directly on the walk between the station and the Sea Garden, so it is hard to avoid and easy to fit in. The same ticket scheme covers the other three expositions of the regional museum, and the combination is worth taking if the weather has turned.