"The Bulgarian Museum - Current State and Perspectives"

Over time, the Bulgarian museum has been weighted with the difficult task of exhibiting the
historical heritage, culture, artistic, and scientific achievements of our society in various scopes and
contents, and to transmit them to future generations so that they can become part of this society. Of
course, we can judge how well the museum and exhibition spaces have managed this task by
considering how much of the vast cultural and historical wealth of our past has reached us in our
present time. However, it remains uncertain how much of this information will reach the future, as
the Bulgarian museum and its current state, not only as a physical structure but also as an institution,
are moving in a direction that predicts a peculiar dematerialization and risks the loss of elements of
our identity.

In recent years, the museum has lost its role as a central hub for disseminating information about our
cultural and historical heritage and has become an increasingly neglected object for such
communication in our society. We can assess this by the poor condition of its material base, the
inadequate adaptation to modern operational requirements, and other problems that arise not only
from material aspects but also from a lack of ideas and direction for development and management.

In the early stages of the formation of the Bulgarian museum, museum spaces were integrated into
existing significant public buildings precisely to fulfill the need to showcase our memory and identity.
This was a good practice for its time, as the task was clear: preservation and transmission of
information. Today, the task may be the same, but society has changed. In order for this connection
between the past and the present to be realized within museum buildings, they need to adapt to the
present in which they have to exist.

In my opinion, some of the changes that need to occur in the functioning of museums include
creating an environment that is accessible to all, in order to gather more diverse societal groups and
facilitate cultural exchange. This involves not only reflecting the requirements of regulations but also
implementing principles of universal design and interactivity in the exhibitions for all visitors. The
exhibition spaces need to be reconsidered since, as mentioned above, important exhibitions are
simply housed in significant buildings from the past, whose function is not even museum-related.
Reconsideration implies a creative collaboration between curators, architects, and artists in
integrating some intervention into an existing exhibition space and assessing its potential to become
a museum. From this perspective, in my opinion, the National Historical Museum in Boyana is an
unsuccessful museum.

Positive examples of museum spaces with high potential for adopting a contemporary development
concept are the museums from the 1960s to the 1980s. Some examples, in my opinion, are the
Archaeological Museum in Veliki Preslav, the Historical Museum in Dryanovo, and the Regional
Historical Museum in Smolyan. They can serve as experimental fields for attempts to modernize
museum buildings and create a new concept for the functioning of museums in Bulgaria.
The Bulgarian museum institution has great potential for the development of cultural and historical
activities and can contribute to opening up these types of buildings to various public activities. I
believe that the catalyst for this change will be architectural intervention in collaboration with all
individuals involved in the existence and development of the Bulgarian museum.