A little history

Last saturday a group of students to a visit to Blagoevgrad's natural history museum. They had displays relating to the region's geological make-up, flora and fauna, and a lot of stuffed animals. They also had a decent amount of artifacts from the Byzantine and Middle Ages. They also had examples of traditional Bulgarian clothing. Probably what was most interesting and definately what they had the most information on was the Bulgarian revolution. Until the late 19th century Bulgaria was still part of the Ottoman Empire (or what Bulgarians call the Turkish Enslavement). They had displays of different revolutionaries, guns and muskets, books, and letters from that time. We had a tour guide who only spoke Bulgarian but Savina translated for us. It was still kind of hard to understand completely what the guide was telling us. But they are very proud of this part of their history. Blagoevgrad was named after the founder of the Bulgarian Communist party, Dimitar Blagoev, and it is only one of five towns in Bulgaria that didn't change it's name after the fall of the Soviet Union.