Etnographic museum

Worth a detour

The costume collection is the reason to come: festival dress from the Bulgarian, Greek and Turkish communities of the south-east, and from the families resettled here out of what is now Greece and Turkey, with the silver, gold and beadwork that went with it. It is a small museum and forty minutes will do it, but it explains more about Strandzha than the drive through Strandzha does.

Story

Background

The exposition is arranged around four themes — customs and rituals, crafts and their masters, traditional art, and town life — and the strongest of them is the first. This corner of Bulgaria sat on a frontier that moved repeatedly, and the wardrobe records it: dress from villages that are now on the Turkish side, from Greek Anchialos before the fire of 1906, from the Aegean Thracian families who arrived as refugees, all of it kept as festival clothing long after everyday dress had gone European.

The jewellery is displayed as it was worn rather than as objects in a case, which is the right decision, and the weight of it is the thing that surprises people. The crafts section covers the trades a port town needed — coopers, rope-makers, tinsmiths — and the town-life rooms reconstruct the interior of a Burgas merchant household at the point when the money arrived.

The building is one of the four listed houses the regional museum occupies, on Slavyanska Street a couple of minutes off the pedestrian line. Entry is about €3 and it keeps the same ten-to-six, seven-day hours as the museum's other three expositions. If you are going on to Sozopol, note that the town there has its own ethnographic museum in the Kurtidi house, with quite different opening hours and a much shorter winter season.