Travel Bulgaria - Museum Towns

	It would be difficult to imagine the Bulgaria of National Revival times without seeing its museum towns and villages. Although we call them museums, they are full of life, harmony and beauty.

OLD PLOVDIV More ancient than Bulgaria itself, this singular city preserves vivid memories of its turbulent and dramatic fate. In 342 B.C. Philip II of Macedon conquered the Thracian town of Evmolpia and named it after himself - Philippopolis. At the start of our millennium the Romans conquered Thrace and called the city Trimontium. During the 19th century, Bulgarian master builders erected the National Revival city of Plovdiv (the Old Town) with steep cobbled lanes, lovely houses with large bay windows and slender columns, latticed eaves and heavy oak gates, quiet green yards and rippling marble fountains. Every house here has its own style and atmosphere.
Lovely houses in the Old Plovdiv

KOPRIVSHTITSA White stone walls overgrown with ivy and wild geranium, fenced in gardens full of flowers, vaulted stone bridges across the bubbly Topolnitsa river, heavy, iron-studded gates hiding blue, yellow and red houses with verandas, bay windows and eaves with spacious rooms lit up by brightly coloured rugs and cushions, carved ceilings and cupboards, copper vessels and ceramics. Specialists say that every house in Koprivshtitsa is a work of art. The Oslekov, Kableshkov and Lyutov houses are fine examples of this.
Stone covered street in Koprivshtitsa

BOZHENTSI ARCHITECTURAL AND HISTORIC RESERVE An idyllic village nestling in the folds of the Balkan Range, 16 km from the town of Gabrovo, which time seems to have lulled to sleep centuries ago. The shutters of the workshops have been closed, the blacksmiths have stopped hammering. the hearths have gone out. The well in the square. the wax workshop and the St. Elija Church are almost 200 years old. TRYAVNA This small town seems painted on the green Balkan Range peaks by the painters of the famous Tryavna school of art. Cross the small vaulted stone bridge and find yourself in a dream world - over 130 National Revival period houses with scarlet pelargoniums in the window sills and tufted box shrubs in the yards. Inside the rooms the wood has burst into suits, ripened into wheat ears and filled out into juicy apples in the hands of skillful craftsmen. KOTEL and ZHERAVNA These are two other names which will capture your attention and imagination with their typical wooden houses built by skillful masters with an amazing, sense of harmony and beauty. Wonderful hand-woven carpets and colourful cushions reveal the exquisite taste of the Bulgarian homemaker.
ARBANASSI Austere houses that resemble minor fortresses on the outside. with high, solid walls and heavy gates, iron, rids and secret hiding-places, but which are spacious and comfortable, richly decorated and furnished on the inside. The oldest of Arbanassi's five churches is The Birth of Christ ( 1637 - 1649) dug into the ground without a belfry and with hidden cupola, but hiding a genuine art gallery with over 3 500 stunningly realistic figures and Biblical scenes, painted by unknown artists throughout the ages.

MELNIK Steep, strangely shaped sandstone rocks, lovely white houses perched on their slopes and a single street which leads to the finest example of the former splendour of this small southern town. The Kordopoulos House - with Venetian stained glass windows, spacious rooms and salons, ornamental murals, weaves and fretwork, a wrought iron gate and large wine-cellar from which caravans with the famous Melnik wine once left for Salonika, Athens, Vienna, Rome, and even Marseille and Spain.
Spring in Melnik
BANSKO Here at the foot of the Pirin Mountains, the houses look almost like monasteries - just as austere and inaccessible, with high stone walls and small latticed windows, The true Bulgarian spirit is hidden behind the solid walls and heavy gates - spacious rooms with friezes and bay windows, carved ceilings and doors, pretty, rugs and embroidered cushions, in the murals, icons and amazingly carved iconostasis of the Holy Trinity Church (1832-35).
Belfry in the centrum of Bansko with Pirin Mountain in the back

NESSEBUR Situated on a small peninsula (in the immediate vicinity of the large seaside resort of Sunny Beach), one of the oldest towns in Europe still exudes the spirit of different ages and peoples - Thracians, Hellenes, Romans, Slavs, Byzantines and Bulgarians. Nessebur's greatest wealth are its many churches, the Old Bishop's Residence in an early Byzantine style (4th-5th c.), the New Bishops Residence (St. Stefan), containing valuable 12-th century murals, the Christ Pantocrator and Alitrgetos churches (13th -14th c.). Nessebur's National Revival houses with stone foundations and broad wooden eaves, overhanging narrow cobbled lanes leading right into the sea, are also remarkably beautiful.
View from Nessebur

SOZOPOL Apollonia - this is how it was called in 610 B.C. by its founders - Greek settlers from Miletus, who erected a majestic bronze statue of the God of Health, Sun and Beauty (Apollo) above the town. Numerous red and black figural vases, coloured glass vessels, jewelry, amphorae and anchors, now exhibited in the town's Museum of Ancient Art, date from the heyday of this flourishing town and state. The Bulgarian National Revival period left its own vivid marks on the appearance of this unusual town, some 30 km south of Bourgas, fine architectural ensembles of solid wooden houses.
Typical solid wooden house in Sozopol

[ Back to top of the page ]