Vrana Palace

Worth a detour

Ferdinand bought the land in 1898 and spent three decades turning it into a tree collection with houses in it. The Constitutional Court returned the estate to Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in 1998; the family gave the park to Sofia the following year, and it has opened at weekends since 2013. Quiet, green, slightly strange, and eleven kilometres from Eagles' Bridge.

Story

Background

Ferdinand, who collected living things the way other monarchs collected paintings, laid out the first planting in 1903 and brought in a succession of German, Austrian and French landscape gardeners over the years that followed. A two-storey hunting lodge by Georgi Fingov went up in 1904; the main palace, by Nikola Lazarov, was built between 1909 and 1914 and became the working home of the Bulgarian royal family. The park covers just under a square kilometre and holds several hundred species of tree, shrub and grass, with a lake and rock gardens, and is protected as a monument of landscape architecture.

The legal history is the interesting part. The palace was taken by the state after 1946 and used by the communist government; the Constitutional Court handed it back to Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in June 1998, and in October 1999 the family donated the park to the city on condition that it be opened to the public. That took until June 2013.

What this means on the ground is that you buy a small ticket, join a free guided walk if the timing suits, and stroll around a private house while the people who own it are somewhere inside. Bus 505 runs out from Orlov Most. Take the tour if you can: without it the park is just a nice park.