Archaeological Museum Varna — Attraction in Varna

Verdict: museum with solid exhibit items, good narratives, well-thoughtout route and theme planning for exhibitions, up-to-date museography, complete Bulgarian-English labels and signs -- one of the few museums in Bulgaria that is able to do so. Highly recommend visiting!

Details: two floors of exhibitions along very long wings in many rooms, so be prepared to walk. Ordered chronically, each room has complete English texts to introduce the origin and discovery story around the artifacts, and some particularly important or interesting artifacts have their own narratives, also in both Bulgarian and English. There are lots of archeology and historical background info to help you appreciate what you are seeing, and to grasp the long and layered history of Varna and its surrounding regions, and to get a sense of how this place has evolved over millennia.

There's no map of the museum at the ticket desk or elsewhere, but the rooms are arranged and laid out clearly enough in chronical order, so just follow each room's entry and exit, then a route will emerge naturally to take you through Varna's history and every room in the museum.

Some rooms may have a temporary, thematic exhibition mounted so the chronical route through rooms may be interrupted at some point (there was a temporary exhibition when we visited) but the route returns after the temporary exhibition rooms. Basically just keep walking to and from each room, and you won't miss anything.

Facility is update in most rooms with minimal glare glass cases and in-case lighting. Temperature control is in-place as well, at least on the first floor.

Protips: most interesting or impressive stuff, such as craft gold pieces from 5th millennium BC, is on the first floor. there's an inner courtyard you can hang out or chill at. you can...

if you're close to Varna, you should visit this Museum !! A really beautiful museum that will take you on a journey to explore how people in Varna's zone lived from 100,000 years BC to the middle ages all in a very well organized showrooms. The artifacts found are well preserved and restored, you will discover tons of grave findings and remember to check the world's oldest golden jewellery discovered.

The entry fee was 10 leva for adults/5 for Children and students. Taking picture using your cellphone is free but without flash.

Sadly the museum has no parking space for cars, only for busses, but use Waze or maps to locate the nearest parking lot, avoid the one next to Varna's Municipality tower, it small and 90% of time full, The nearest one was around 700 meteres to the south of the museum, a very huge parking zone with security guard (2 leva/hour) and you can pay on your way out, i stayed around 3 hours at the museum.

You should really visit this...

This was a brilliant place, one of the few museums in Bulgaria where I ended up spending close to four hours without really completing seeing the exhibits. The place is really big, you could easily spend here the whole day if interested in the exhibits. They took out the 10 leva extra charge for taking photos!!! This is very good because there is so much to take in that as a tourist you can't really do it in one visit. The staff are very good staying out of your way. It is very obvious that they have been trying to update the English language descriptions and they have done a good job with it. I have doubts wrt the dating of some of the exhibits given how Bulgarian communists lied to fake their history (this IS a communist museum), but the quantity of stuff here is worth it beyond that for the 10 leva admission fee. The icons were...