National Museum of Natural History

Worth a detour

Ferdinand — the reigning prince, and a serious ornithologist — put his own birds, mammals and butterflies on show in 1889. That makes this the first museum of any kind in the country and the oldest natural history museum in the Balkans. It is a cabinet museum, glass cases and all, and nobody has modernised it away. Open every day of the week.

Story

Background

The Royal Prince's Natural History Museum opened in 1889 with Ferdinand's personal collections as its founding holdings. It belongs now to the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and is both the oldest and the richest institution of its kind on the peninsula.

What is on show: over four hundred mounted mammals, birds of more than twelve hundred species, hundreds of thousands of insects and other invertebrates, and mineral samples covering something like a quarter of all the species known worldwide. The building is small and the floors are stacked, so it goes quickly if you want it to.

It sits at the head of Tsar Osvoboditel boulevard, next to the Russian church and a minute from the old royal palace, which means it slots into a walk you are probably already making. Children tend to do better here than at the grander museums nearby, and adults who like the nineteenth-century way of doing things — rows of specimens, little interpretation, the assumption that looking is enough — will get more out of it than they expect.