Ethnographic Museum of Varna

Overview

The Ethnographic Museum in Varna is among several specialized museums of ethnography in Bulgaria. It is housed in a Revival house built around 1860. It exhibits the great diversity in the culture and way of life of the people of the Varna region from the second half of the XIX and the beginning of the XX century. The exposition is the work of arch. Kamen Goranov, artist - Assoc. Prof. Asen Stoychev and ethnographers Maria Nikolova and Georgi Valkov. The museum exhibits demonstrations of the main livelihoods of the Bulgarians from Varna - agriculture, animal husbandry, beekeeping, fishing, viticulture and crafts, such as cooperage, coppersmithing, furriery and tailoring (tailors). An interesting artifact in the exhibition is a small plow "dolmedja", which was used for plowing until the beginning of the XX century. and nets for weeding wheat, rakes, sieves. Also shown are containers for storing grain and those for making bread - cheat, mug, night (wooden trough), bread shovels. In the exhibition of the museum there are separate corners for two typical work customs, concerning sowing and harvesting. The items related to animal husbandry - most often sheep, are containers for processing and storing milk (buckets and pistons, cups, spoons, diggers). Accessories of the shepherd are also shown - yamurluk (outer garment - type "cape"), hive (leather bag), gega (long stick with a shaped end in the form of a snake). Beekeeping is represented - a very old occupation of the Bulgarians. Until the advent of modern hives, hollow logs or cone-shaped "grass" were used, woven from willow or vine sticks and plastered with a mixture of clay, cattle manure and wood ash. On them is placed a hood of straw, fern, twigs of leaves. Fishing is a livelihood of paramount economic importance for the Bulgarians on the Black Sea coast. The exhibition shows tools used for river fishing and fishing in the Black Sea - bag (net bag with a pointed bottom), blind basket, winter (blind basket system), various types of nets, metal and glass buoys to maintain the nets at the water level, knitting needles for fishing nets. Viticulture is among the oldest livelihoods of Bulgarians. There are tools for processing the vines and vessels of different sizes - apolin, cadus. The wine is stored in larger or smaller barrels. You can see exhibits such as mints, gums, jugs, clothes, spindles and hooks, wheels. On the second floor of the museum are shown the folk costumes, which give an idea of ​​the demographic appearance of the Varna region. The clothing of the population of Varna differs with its great diversity due to the complex migration processes that took place in the first decades of and at the end of the XIX century - local population and migrants from Thrace, Asia Minor and Macedonia. The library of the Ethnographic Museum has over 1600 books and albums, as well as periodicals: "Bulgarian Ethnography", "Bulgarian Folklore", "Historical Review", "Centuries", "Art", "Problems of Culture", foreign editions. in Russian, Serbian, Polish, German.