History of the Museum

Being restored from the ruins left after the fires and devastation of the Russian-Turkish Liberation War in 1877–1878, Stara Zagora started building its future. During the new construction, remains of an ancient inheritance have been found, which patriotic citizens would like to preserve and exhibit. The town and the region have a rich past, whose beginning is dated back to the 6^th millennium B.C. Life here has been going on without interruption until to date and passes through different epochs, leaving multiple artifacts. In 1907 it was decided to create an archaeological society in order to found a local museum for displaying the preserved relicts from the near and distant past. At this time there have already been two national and several local museums constructed in different towns across the country. The people of Stara Zagora are not pioneers in museum work, yet their exhibitions soon became one of the best arranged and most visited in Bulgaria. The first collection was arranged in a schoolroom. Soon after that it was relocated in the hall of the municipal administration. In 1912 a special building was constructed for the town library and the museum. It has hosted the museum for more than 35 years.

For several decades the exposition has been completed with new finds and exponents. The curators Atanas Kozhuharov and Hristo Raykov have majorly contributed towards the advance of the museum at that time. They organised the museum work in Stara Zagora on a scientific basis. By processing and preserving the finds they were able to publish the more interesting exponents. Many archaeological excavations were carried out, including studying several tombs, mosaics and part of the fortress wall of the antique town Augusta Trayana. This in turn increased foreign interest to the town and museum, proven by the visits of ministers, deputies, scientists from Russia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Austria, England, etc. Several attempts in 1830's to transform the museum into a state one, however, proved unsuccessful.

The political change after 9^th September 1944 imposed a reform in all fields of the social-cultural and economic life in the country. The statutory regulations on the museum work were changed. The Soviet experience was widely introduced. The Stara Zagora museum was transformed in 1949 into a municipal mseum and, in 1953 – into a regional historical museum. According it's amount of funds, it is among the first provincial museums in the country.

The 1950's faced a reconstruction in the collection and scientific-research work at the museum. By profile it is a general historical museum and it collects exponents from prehistoric times until the present day. Several departments have been structured: Archaeology, Ethnography, Renaissance, New History and Latest History. After a considerable increase of funds (a result of systematic archaeological excavations) the Archaeology Department was subdivided into departments of Pre-history, Antique Archaeology, Medieval Archaeology and Numismatics. In 1959 the museum was accommodated in a new building, specially reconstructed for the purpose, at Ruski blvd. № 42, where it remained until 1986. Permanent expositions of all departments were arranged there. The institution was the place where the entire creative biography of a number of specialists – historians and philologists, passed. Two of them – Velichka Koycheva and Dimitar Nikolov, were pronounced honourable citizens of Stara Zagora. In 1963 a scientific group was created. Its members have a large volume of scientific products, contributing both to the local and national history. The bio-bibliographic Reference Book, published by the museum in 1995, contained a considerable part of them.

Hundreds of expositions have been set up by the museum in the past years. They have been devoted to different subjects. Most of them were arranged in Stara Zagora, and with others the museum has visited different towns in the country. Exponents from Stara Zagora have often been included in expositions abroad – in Canada, Germany, Japan, Austria, Italy, USA, Russia, the Czech Republic, etc.

A significant role for the popularization work is attributed to the scientific-popular papers in the press and the museum editions. A considerable part of them is connected with the permanent expositions and the temporary expositions and, others are devoted to anniversaries. The sequel “Our past” was promoted, which included books and brochures on different subjects. In 1975, by initiative of Stara Zagora, several museums from the region started publishing Proceedings of the Museums from South-East Bulgaria, and in 2002 the first volume of the Proceedings of the Stara Zagora Museum was published. During its century-old past, the institution has published almost 140 independent editions. Together with the schools in Stara Zagora, the museum works under the Museum and the School Programme.

Today the Stara Zagora Museum maintains and attends a number of independent project sites in the town: Neolithic dwellings (6^th millennium B.C.), Antique Forum Complex 2^nd-4^th c., Late-antique Residential Home with Mosaics, IV^-th c., Late-antique Public Building with Mosaics, 4^th-6^th c. in the Post-Office building, the Hilendar covenant, the House-Museum of the Town Lifestyle in the 19^th c., and others. The institution hosts more than 100,000 original exponents from different epochs. Exceptional by their value are most of the collections: the prehistoric, the ethnographic and the numismatic, the collection of Thracian chariots, the antique bronze, the antique glass, relicts, connected with the history of the Bulgarian people from the Renaissance until present days. Unique exponents are a bone idol and a marble anthropomorphic figure (5^th millennium B.C.), a helmet-mask, a Sarmatian sword, a golden necklace, lanterns, a glass phial with a dancing woman, a marble statuary group of Orpheus from the antique epoch, a stone plate of a lioness with a cub from the 6^th c., a copy of the Slav-Bulgarian History by Paisii of Hilendar, etc.

In the past years, the museum administered and participated in dozens of archaeological expeditions. The most significant of which were the excavations of the Azmashka village mound, (the first village mound on the Balkan Peninsula, entirely investigated), the prehistoric copper mines in the Mechi kladenets near Stara Zagora (Bulgarian-Russian expedition), the multi-layer historical site in Chatalka locality, dozens sites in the archaeological reservation Augusta-Trayana-Vereya-Borui, the late-antique road station Karasura near the village of Rupkite, Chirpan region (Bulgarian-German expedition), and many sepulchral mounds.

The Stara Zagora museum maintains international contacts with more than 20 museums, universities and libraries in Germany, England, Russia, Rumania, Austria, Macedonia, France, Greece, Hungary and others. The Directors Dimitar Nikolov and Hristo Buyukliev are members of the UNESCO’ International Council of Museums – ICOM. In 1984 Stara Zagora hosted the 8^th International Symposium on antique bronze, attended by scientists from over 30 countries worldwide to present their papers. The Stara Zagora Museum participated in the corps of antique mosaics and frescoes from Bulgaria, issued in Vienna. It has been the organizer and co-organizer of international, national and regional scientific conferences, symposia and colloquia. The Museum in Stara Zagora was one of the participants in the preparation and creation of the scientific-documentary film “The Birth of Europe”, produced by initiative of BBC, England. It shows the technology for copper production in the 4^th millennium B.C. and contains shots of the Neolithic dwellings from the 6^th millennium B.C., found in situ and the prehistoric village mound.

In 2007, during it's centennial jubilee, the museum was accommodated in a new building, built especially for that purpose. In the last two years, its activity has been focused on the development of the thematic concept for the new exposition and on popularizing the cultural inheritance of the region.