National History Museum

Worth a detour

Bulgaria's biggest museum lives in the marble residence built for the last communist leader, out in Boyana under Vitosha. That is the second reason to come: Boyana Church is about a kilometre and a half down the hill, and the two make an obvious morning. Allow longer than you expect — the corridors are enormous and the route through them is not short.

Story

Background

The building was Residence No. 1, the state house of Todor Zhivkov, who led the Bulgarian Communist Party for thirty-five years. The museum moved in during 2000. Nobody labels the architecture, but the scale of the halls and the amount of marble are as much a historical exhibit as anything in the cases, and it is worth walking the place with that in mind.

The collection runs to something over six hundred and fifty thousand items, and the Thracian metalwork is the draw: the Panagyurishte service of nine gold vessels — a phiale, an amphora, three jugs and four rhytons, a little over six kilograms of it, made around the turn of the fourth and third centuries BC — plus silver from Letnitsa, Borovo and Rogozen, and rooms of Revival-period woodwork and costume upstairs.

Getting there is straightforward and not obvious. Buses 63 and 107 run up to Boyana from the Tsar Boris III boulevard side; the 64 links Boyana and Dragalevtsi and starts from the Zoo. From the museum, walk down and across to Boyana Church rather than doubling back into town. The two sites are a short, mostly downhill walk apart and see completely different crowds.