National Anthropological Museum
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Description
- Sofia
- Posted 2 years ago
The National Anthropological Museum spans an area of more than 700 sq.m. It has a lobby, a training room, a main hall, numerous small halls, several labrooms and an audience.
The National Anthropological Museum is situated in Sofia, Bulgaria, at 73 Tsarigradsko Shose Blvd., near to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building. It is one of numerous museums run by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS) and is overseen by the Institute of Experimental Morphology and Anthropology.
The museum opened in March 2007, after the success of Man in the Past, a touring exhibition organized by the Institute. Many recreated photographs of individuals who lived on our land at different historical times may be seen in the museum. At the opening of the exhibition, a particular showcase displays the various phases of the restoration work.
The museum has a national ossuary where all anthropological items discovered during archaeological digs are stored. This database is used by scientists and scholars to learn about the individuals who lived in Bulgarian lands from ancient times to the present.
The Anthropological Museum’s exhibits are organized chronologically: Prehistory, Antiquity, Middle Ages, and National Revival. Several reconstructions of face characteristics based on skeletal remains unearthed during excavations depict the development of facial features and their increasing gracilisation (an evolutionary process in which the facial bones gradually change and the facial features become finer). A recreated picture of the priest is buried in burial No. 43 of the Varna Necropolis — this is the grave where the earliest mined gold in Europe (5000 – 4000 BC) was unearthed. The portrait of the Thracian princess unearthed in the tomb at Mogilanska Mound in Vratsa will captivate visitors.
The restored pictures of Bulgarian Tsars Kaloyan (1168 – 1207) and Samuel (Unknown – 1014) are among the most intriguing exhibits in the museum. There are additional representations of Zahari Stoyanov, Hristo Botev, and Georgi Rakovski in the museum, all of whom were major combatants in the liberation of Bulgaria from Ottoman domination.
The exhibit also has many rebuilt tombs with remains flexed (in a fetal posture) and stretched (Christian burial, with arms crossed on the chest).