Varna Archaeological Museum

Worth a detour

The Varna necropolis turned up by accident in 1972, when a man digging a cable trench on the edge of town cut into a grave. What came out — around three thousand gold objects weighing some six kilogrammes — is the oldest technologically worked gold anyone has found, made roughly between 4600 and 4200 BC. The rest of the museum is a competent provincial collection; the gold rooms are what you are paying for.

Story

Background

The find was made in October 1972 in Varna's western industrial zone, by a digger operator called Raycho Marinov who noticed flint and metal in the spoil. Excavation uncovered a cemetery of the Varna Chalcolithic culture, later dated by radiocarbon to the second half of the fifth millennium BC.

What makes it matter is not the weight but the distribution. A handful of graves hold almost everything; most hold very little. That is a society already sorting itself into ranks, more than a thousand years before the first Egyptian pyramids. Grave 43 is the famous one — long described as a chieftain's burial, more recently argued to be a metalworker's, which would be its own kind of statement about who mattered. Several graves contain no body at all, only a clay mask laid where a face would be.

The building was put up between 1892 and 1898 as a girls' high school, to a design by Petko Momchilov, and the museum moved in during 1983. The rooms are plain and the labelling is sparse, so it helps to know what you are looking for. Adults pay about €10 and students about €4; in winter the doors stay shut on Sundays and Mondays.