Krastata Kazarma

Worth a detour

Osman Pazvantoğlu, who ran Vidin as a near-independent warlord, had these barracks built in 1801 on the garden of the old palace. The plan is a Greek cross — four wings, four internal courtyards, about 1,260 square metres of footprint — which is a strange shape for a barracks and probably the reason the building outlived its purpose. Since 1969 it has held Vidin's ethnographic collection.

Story

Background

Pazvantoğlu was an Ottoman governor on paper and a rebel in practice, and for two decades around 1800 Vidin was effectively his own state, minting coin and making war on the Sultan. The barracks housed four separate units under him, janissaries among them, and a covered wooden bridge linked it to an armoury next door. A clock tower once stood in the yard and is gone.

After 1878 the Bulgarian state used it as a courthouse and then as army barracks, which is how buildings like this usually survive: by being useful to whoever comes next. It was restored between 1965 and 1967 and turned into a museum. A larger, EU-funded restoration finished in early 2013; within a year the old cracks had reopened and the roof was letting water in, and the building has spent time closed since.

The ethnographic display, in place since 1969, covers the traditional culture of the Vidin region from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1920s — ritual and everyday costume, and a section on urban dress and household objects that shows how much of Vidin's material life arrived from up the Danube rather than from inland. Labels are in five languages.