History museum (Burgas)

Worth a detour

Burgas is a young city — it had a few hundred houses when Sozopol and Nesebar were already ancient — and this exposition covers the century and a half in which it overtook both. It is the most text-heavy of the regional museum's four branches and the hardest going without Bulgarian, but it is the only place that explains why the town looks the way it does.

Story

Background

The exposition runs from the Liberation of 1878 through the Balkan wars to the middle of the twentieth century, using photographs, documents and the belongings of local families. The through-line is the port: the railway arrived, the harbour was built, grain and later oil went out through it, and a small anchorage on a shallow bay became the fourth city of Bulgaria in about two generations.

Alongside that sit the things a regional museum collects — the Balkan wars centenary material, the local figures the town names its streets after, the monuments and memorials of the city catalogued and explained. There is a section built out of family memories of the town, which is the warmest part of it.

The building is at Lermontov 31, a listed house of the same period as the other three, a few minutes' walk from the archaeological exposition. Hours are ten to six daily and the ticket is about €3, or roughly €4.50 for two museums and €9 for all four. If you are choosing between branches on a short visit, put this one last: the archaeology explains the coast, the ethnography explains the hinterland, and the natural history explains the lakes, while this one mostly explains Burgas to people who already live in it.