Kaliopa House

Worth a detour

A house of 1864 that held the Prussian consulate, now furnished the way a well-off Ruse family kept one around 1900: drawing room, living room, music salon, bedroom, furniture shipped from Vienna, silver, porcelain, city clothes. It is small and you will be through it in half an hour, and it is the shortest good argument for why Ruse looks the way it does.

Story

Background

In the second half of the nineteenth century Ruse was the Ottoman Empire's Danube port and the seat of Midhat Pasha's Danube Vilayet. Money, consulates and Central European taste came upriver together, and what the city built in those decades — the facades along the main square, this house, the cathedral a few streets away — is why Ruse still reads as the most Habsburg-looking town in Bulgaria.

The building went up in 1864, with a facade in a Levantine manner not otherwise common here, and the murals on the upper floor were painted in 1896 by an Austrian named Schauesberg. The name comes from Kaliopa — Katerina Kalish, wife of the Prussian consul Moritz Kalish — who is said to have been given the house by Midhat Pasha, who was in love with her. That story is told everywhere and documented nowhere; take it as part of the furniture.

The furniture itself is the point. The rooms are staged rather than preserved, but the objects are real and specific: Viennese cabinets, jewellery, silverware, porcelain, and the first grand piano imported into the country.