site.btaNew Issue of BTA’s LIK Magazine: Showcasing Bulgarian Archaeology Abroad

The Bulgarian News Agency (BTA) presented Monday the March issue of its LIK magazine themed "Bulgaria's Cultural Heritage Travels the World". The event was held at the National Archaeological Institute with Museum at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (NAIM-BAS) in hybrid format, with many participants joining in by video conference from BTA's national press clubs in Bulgaria and abroad. 

The March issue was inspired by the exhibition "Ancient Thrace and the Classical World: Treasures from Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece," which was held at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The exhibition opened in early November 2024, and the artefacts will be returning to Bulgaria later in March. 

In addition to the display in the United States, the magazine highlights a number of other exhibitions which have brought Bulgaria's ancient history to international audiences since the mid-20th century.

In his opening remarks, BTA Director General Kiril Valchev said that this issue has three messages and one of them is that it is about memory for memory's sake.

The second message is about the discussions that often grow into arguments on how the past should be presented. 

This issue's third message is about cooperation between the museums of Bulgaria. Such cooperation led to the exhibition in Los Angeles. Valchev added: "This issue is also an example that Bulgarians can work together, and Bulgarian museums are setting an example of that."

Some of the questions that LIK looks into are whether Bulgaria's cultural heritage should travel abroad at all, or whether curious foreigners should have to travel to Bulgaria to see it; whether artefacts should be collected in one place to facilitate access to them, or whether they should remain in local museums close to the original sites where they were discovered, since the latter could boost the local economy of smaller towns.

LIK Editor-in-Chief Georgi Lozanov said that people in Bulgaria and the Balkans largely base their cultural identity on their past and their heritage. "It is a long discussion whether the past is the authentic way of building a contemporary cultural identity - this is very characteristic of the Balkans," said Lozanov. "This past largely depends on who we are today, what we can do with it today, how we can narrate it, whether we are even capable of narrating it, how we can relate to the great cultural wealth in our lands. This is the opportunity for our cultural identity to be restored as part of our own heritage. In other words, what heritage we have is reflected, even indirectly, in this issue of the LIK magazine.”

Yanitsa Hristova, the LIK Managing Editor, recalled three archaeological exhibitions which travelled the world. In 1963, "Treasures of Bulgarian Museums" visited Paris and queues stretched for two blocks. The French Minister of Culture at the time called the exhibition the best of the season. In 1981, a Bulgarian exhibition visited New Delhi and was attended by Indira Gandhi, who was impressed by what she saw. In 1982, the exhibition toured Japan, where a local scholar said it demonstrated that the roots of the oldest civilizations originated in Bulgaria.

According to Margarit Damyanov, who was curator on the Bulgarian side for the Getty Museum exhibition in Los Angeles, exhibitions presenting Bulgaria’s culture abroad can arouse the interest of Bulgarians in their cultural heritage and remind them what they have inherited from their ancestors. Such events can also encourage foreigners to come to Bulgaria to get a fuller picture of what they saw in an exhibition in their country. Damyanov said: “In addition to presenting all those splendid artifacts to the world, it is important to show how we look after them, but we always need to do more. Our cultural heritage is huge.” The archaeologist thanked everyone who worked for the L.A. exhibition, which, unfortunately, came at a time when the metropolis was ravaged by wildfires.

Archaeology professor Totko Stoyanov of the Department of Archaeology at Sofia University argued that exhibitions abroad are important for what they show as facts, but they are also important for the trends they outline, and these trends are clear to archaeologists abroad. He noted that sometimes there is a dispute about the concepts behind exhibitions: what, how much and how to show at these exhibitions abroad, which is natural, because the researchers who participate in these exhibitions have different views.

On the pages of the LIK magazine Prof. Totko Stoyanov talks about his experience as a curator of the exhibition "The Epic of the Thracian Kings", presented at the Louvre in Paris in 2015.