Regional Historical Museum

Worth a detour

The Burgas regional museum is not a single building but four, all within a ten-minute walk of each other in the centre: archaeology, ethnography, history and natural history. A ticket to one is about €3, all four about €9, and they keep identical hours seven days a week. If you have one wet afternoon in Burgas, this is the thing to do with it.

Story

Background

It began in 1912 as the private collection of the Debelt archaeological society, a group of Burgas intellectuals who wanted the region's past dug up and written down. The provincial governor Hristo Bogoev chaired it and Pavel Vodenicharov ran the museum. In 1946 the society handed everything to the municipality and it became the town's People's Museum, with the young archaeologist Ivan Galabov as director; he did much of the fieldwork that modern archaeology in this corner of Bulgaria still rests on. Regional status followed by ministerial order in 2000, and the holdings now run past a hundred thousand items.

The four buildings are themselves listed, put up between the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth, when Burgas was suddenly a port with money. Archaeology is at Aleko Bogoridi 21, ethnography at Slavyanska 69, history at Lermontov 31 and natural history at Fotinov 30.

The order that works is archaeology first, for the ancient coast, then ethnography for the Strandzha villages, then natural history if you have children with you. The history exposition is the thinnest of the four for a foreign visitor and the easiest to leave out. Combination tickets are sold at any of the four; a family ticket for everything is about €10.