Description of the attraction
A museum dedicated to socialist art was opened in Sofia on September 19, 2011. It is a branch of the National Art Gallery of Bulgaria. The museum has acted as the country's first repository, where not only are they collected, but also used the unique samples of Bulgarian art, created between 1944 and 1989. All works are united by a common theme - the era of socialism.
The museum complex includes a video hall, an art gallery and a park with an area of 7.5 square kilometers. In the park, you can see the works of monumental sculpture in the amount of 77 exhibits. For the most part, these are busts and statues of famous Soviet and Bulgarian communists - V. I. Lenin, G. Dimitrov, D. Blagoev, V. Kolarov, T. Zhivkov and other active political figures. Other sculptures represent images of collective farmers, partisans, workers and Red Army men typical of socialist realism.
The area of a separate art gallery is 550 sq.m. Here 60 paintings are exhibited as exhibits, and about 25 more - works related to easel art.
The video hall shows documentaries that were filmed during the heyday of Bulgarian socialism. There is also a small shop where you can buy authentic items of the socialist era or their modern copies as souvenirs.
Not far from the entrance to the museum park, there is a symbol of communism and socialism in the Bulgarian Republic - the original form of a red star, which in the period from 1964 to 1984 towered in the center of the city above the House of the Party. Thus, the seat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Bulgaria was a kind of political symbol in Sofia of that era.
The museum building itself is new and today it houses part of the structures of the Ministry of Culture of Bulgaria, namely: the national folklore ensemble "Philip Kutev", the Institute of Architectural Heritage of the national scale, the "Restoration" company, divisions of the art gallery of the national level, etc.
