Burgas Art Gallery

Worth a detour

Two things make this worth the euro and a half. The building is the former Burgas synagogue, built in 1909 to a design by an Italian architect and given to the gallery in 1966. And the top floor holds a standing collection of Strandzha icons from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, painted by named hands from Ahtopol, Sozopol, Edirne and Chios — a school that exists almost nowhere else.

Story

Background

The gallery opened in April 1946 and moved into the synagogue twenty years later. The holdings now run to more than two thousand eight hundred works — icons, painting, sculpture and prints — and include Vladimir Dimitrov-Maystora, Zlatyu Boyadzhiev, Dechko Uzunov, Svetlin Rusev and Encho Pironkov, so the first two floors are a serviceable short course in twentieth-century Bulgarian painting.

The local rooms are better than that sounds. Burgas painters have worked the same subject for a century — the bay, the boats, the light off the salt pans — and seeing Georgi Baev, Petko Zadgorski and Stoyan Tsanev hung together makes the coast outside look different. Zadgorski, whose name the gallery carries, has a 1947 painting of a gemia, a Black Sea sailing barge, that is the single best thing in the building.

The third floor is the surprise. The Strandzha icons were painted for village churches in a border district that stayed Orthodox under difficult conditions, and the iconographers are identified: Zahari and Dimitar Zograf, Ioan Zograf of Ahtopol, Socrates Georgiev of Sozopol, Todor Zograf of Chios, Nikola Zograf of Edirne. Entry is about €1.50, a euro concession, and free on Thursday mornings. The address is Mitropolit Simeon 24, two streets off the pedestrian line.