Sea Casino Burgas

Worth a detour

The white building on the cliff edge in the Sea Garden is the one piece of architecture Burgas photographs from every angle. It opened on 7 August 1938 to a competition-winning design, stood derelict for the better part of twenty years, and reopened in March 2011 as a cultural centre: four halls, a creative studio and a terrace over the beach. Exhibitions cost about €5; the outdoor programme is usually free.

Story

Background

The name misleads English speakers. In 1930s Bulgarian a casino was a seaside pavilion with a restaurant and a dance floor, and that is what this was — the social centre of the promenade, joined to the pier below by a stone stair. The municipality ran a design competition in 1936 and received seventeen entries; the winner was project 333 by Viktoria Angelova, one of the first women architects in Bulgaria. It cost the town two million leva and opened on 7 August 1938.

After 1989 it fell out of use and stood closed and deteriorating for nearly two decades. The restored building reopened over two days, 26 and 27 March 2011, and is listed as a monument of culture. Inside are four halls named for people the city claims — Aleksandar Georgiev-Kodzhakafaliya, Georgi Baev, Petya Dubarova and Hristo Fotev — along with a workshop space used for photography and applied-art classes, and terraces facing the water. On the seaward side is the open-air stage everyone calls the Snail, which runs free concerts through the summer evenings.

One thing to get right: the Georgi Baev gallery-museum is not in this building. The hall named after the Burgas painter is; the gallery devoted to him is a separate two-storey house at Demokratsiya 6, opened in December 2013, with its own collection and its own ticket of about €3. At the casino, temporary exhibitions cost around €5, half that for students and pensioners, while concerts and openings on the alley outside are generally free. There is a telescope on the terrace for a euro.