Ethnographic Museum

After entering Hall 1 of the Ethnographic Museum you’ll be greeted with step-by-step instructions on how to make kirpich (bricks). It's around this point you’ll probably consider the entrance fee money badly spent, but don’t give up. Ethnography is the study of different cultures and how they behave and evolve, and in this sense the museum mirrors its aims completely. After starting with the building blocks of Bulgarian rural life, things progress into an exhibition about the town of Yugavo in the Rhodope Mountains. It includes some beautiful black and white pictures from the village including men in fezzes and straight-backed woman, all with darkened skin from a lifetime in the fields. In the next rooms you will see a different kind of building block: looms and knitting needles the size of pneumatic drills. There are also children’s toys and dolls that would not out of place in a horror film today. Certainly one of the city’s less trumpeted attractions, it’s without doubt one of its most charming.