Varna Archaeological Museum
Museum in a former girls' high school holding the Varna Chalcolithic necropolis gold.
The museum grew out of the Varna Archaeological Society, founded in 1901 by the brothers Karel and Hermann Škorpil, and opened to the public on 11 June 1906. Since 1983 it has occupied the former Girls' High School on Maria Luiza Boulevard, a late Baroque building raised between 1892 and 1898 to designs by the Bulgarian architect Petko Momchilov. Its two floors and basement are arranged around a courtyard, with about 2,150 square metres of display space in some twenty rooms.
The permanent displays run from the Palaeolithic to the Middle Ages, covering prehistory, Thracian and Greek settlement on the Black Sea coast, Roman Odessos, and medieval Bulgaria. Three halls are devoted to the Varna Chalcolithic necropolis, discovered by chance in 1972 during cable-laying, whose graves of about 4600–4200 BC yielded the oldest processed gold yet found. Further sections cover icons from the region and Roman-period sculpture and epigraphy from the city and its territory.
Highlights
- Gold from the Varna necropolis, the world's oldest worked gold
- Late Baroque former Girls' High School of 1892–1898
- Displays running from the Palaeolithic to the Middle Ages
- Roman Odessos sculpture, inscriptions and coin collections
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