National Anthropological Museum

Overview

The National Anthropological Museum in Sofia, established in 2007, is one of the newest museums in Bulgaria. It is located right next to the building of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It is ruled by the Institute of Experimental Morphology and Anthropology at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. The director of the museum is Prof. Yordan Yordanov. He is one of the few anthropologists in the world and the only one in our country who is able to recreate a face from a skull.

There are a lot of faces reconstructed from skulls, showing what people who inhabited our lands in different historical epochs looked like. Тhe stages of the facial recovery process are demonstrated. 

The museum was created to promote the anthropological research of the population that inhabited our lands from the Neolithic to the Renaissance, by studying bone material from archaeological excavations. Data on the diseases that left traces on the bones, healing practices, and ritual actions related to the religion of the people of different historical epochs are presented.

The exposition is arranged in chronological order - Prehistory, Antiquity, Middle Ages, and Renaissance.

One of the most interesting museum objects is the restored face of Thracian princes as well as the restored faces of the Bulgarian kings Kaloyan and Samuil.