Varna Aquarium

Worth a detour

Small, old, and rather good for it: three rooms of Black Sea life behind a clam-shell relief on Primorski Boulevard. The foundation stone went down in 1906 and the building was finished by 1911, but two wars and the peace terms that followed pushed the opening to 1932. The tanks are modest and the labels are dated. It costs about two euros and it is an hour of shade in August.

Story

Background

Dabko Dabkov, a Varna architect trained in Munich, designed the building as part of the improvement of the Sea Garden, the seafront park laid out from 1894 to a plan by the Czech gardener Anton Novak. The façade still carries its large clam relief with smaller carvings of Black Sea species around it — worth a look before you go in.

Inside are over 140 fish species, mostly Black Sea but with freshwater, Mediterranean and a handful of exotics. Two further rooms hold preserved specimens, shells and displays on how this sea actually works: its layered water, its dead lower depths, its short food chains. The aquarium belongs to the Institute of Fish Resources and keeps a specialist library of some thirty thousand volumes, including nineteenth-century books and charts.

Be clear-eyed about what this is. It is a 1930s aquarium in a 1930s building, not a modern marine park, and children used to vast curved tanks may shrug. What it does well is the Black Sea itself, which is a far stranger body of water than it looks from the beach. Open Tuesday to Sunday, roughly nine to five, for about the price of a coffee.