Plovdiv Regional History Museum

Worth a detour

Eastern Rumelia was an autonomous Ottoman province invented by the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and absorbed into Bulgaria in 1885, and this was its assembly building — Pietro Montani's design, finished in the year it all ended. The permanent exhibition covers the Unification, the founding story most Bulgarians learn at school. Document-heavy and light on English, so it rewards prior interest rather than supplying it.

Story

Background

The Congress of Berlin in 1878 took the large Bulgaria that the Treaty of San Stefano had drawn and cut it up. One of the pieces, the territory south of the Balkan range, became Eastern Rumelia: autonomous, with its own assembly and militia, but formally still Ottoman, and with Plovdiv as its capital. It lasted seven years.

The building on Unification Square went up in 1885 for that assembly, to a design by Pietro Montani, the Italian architect who worked for the province. In September of the same year a bloodless coup in Plovdiv declared union with the Principality of Bulgaria, the province ceased to exist, and the house lost its purpose almost immediately. It held libraries and collections before it became a museum.

The permanent exhibition, laid out for the centenary in 1985 and covering something like a thousand square metres, follows the Rumelian years and the Unification through documents, weapons, photographs and personal objects. It is a serious exhibition about a specific political event, which is another way of saying it is not much of an introduction to anything. With one free afternoon in Plovdiv and no particular interest in nineteenth-century Balkan politics, the Old Town houses will give you more. With that interest, this is the room where it happened.