Etar Architectural-Ethnographic Complex

Worth a detour

Lazar Donkov opened this in September 1964 as the country's first open-air museum, and its distinguishing feature is that the machinery works. Mills, fulling mills and a sawmill are driven by the Sivek running through the site, and the craft workshops are staffed by people actually making things. Come in the first hour after opening; by midday the coaches from Veliko Tarnovo are in.

Story

Background

The idea Donkov argued for was that the past has to be visible to be understood, and the site he chose made that easy: a stretch of the Sivek river south of Gabrovo where water-powered workshops had stood anyway. Building started in 1963 by restoring what was already there — a primitive karadzheyka mill, a fulling mill, a valyavitsa for washing woollens — and then moving in further buildings from villages around the central Balkan range. It opened on 7 September 1964.

The result covers about seven hectares and roughly fifty structures, and it holds the only collection in Bulgaria of hydro-powered technical installations. That is the part worth standing still for. These are not models. The water is diverted down flumes, the wheels turn, and the fulling mill pounds cloth the way it did when this was how cloth was finished.

The other half is the craftsmen's street, a line of some sixteen Revival-period buildings with workshops on the ground floor and living space above, reconstructing the trading street of a nineteenth-century Balkan town. Bell-making, tanning, woodcarving, cartwrighting, pottery, baking, oil pressing, instrument making: the crafts are worked rather than displayed, and what the makers produce is what is sold. It shades into souvenir territory in high summer, but the buildings, the river and the machinery hold the thing together.