Euxinograd

Worth a detour

The palace Bulgaria's monarchs built for their summers, eight kilometres north of Varna, is still a working government residence, and that is the first thing to know about visiting: you cannot turn up at the gate. Visits are arranged in advance, and the route takes in the house, the orangeries, the chapel and the cellar, which has been making white wine on the estate since 1891.

Story

Background

The site, where a monastery had stood, was given to Prince Alexander of Battenberg in 1882 and he began building at once. The Viennese architect Viktor Rumpelmayer drew the first conversion in 1885; under Ferdinand the house was rebuilt to look like an eighteenth-century French château, to designs by Hermann Mayer with Nikola Lazarov. The name Euxinograd, from the old Greek name for the Black Sea, dates from 1893.

The park was laid out from the late 1880s by French landscape architects, among them Édouard André, with tens of thousands of trees shipped in from Marseille; several species growing here are found nowhere else in the Balkans. The gardens run in zones — a formal centre, a Greek garden, an English garden, a strip along the stream, and the beach. The winery of 1891 still works, and a tasting is usually part of the tour.

Because it remains a state residence, with cabinet meetings held here in summer, access is managed rather than open: fixed routes, fixed times, and parts of the estate simply closed. Book by telephone or email well ahead, especially in July and August. City buses from Varna stop at the gate.