BTA News

Fourteen Bulgarian Museums to Participate in Exhibition at Getty Museum in LA

Fourteen museums from Bulgaria with a total of over 150 objects will participate in a forthcoming exhibition of Thracian treasures at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, USA. The finds will be on display from November 3 to March 3, 2025, the National Archaeological Institute with Museum at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (NAIM-BAS) told BTA.

The team noted that Bulgarian objects represent more than 90% of all exhibits included in the exhibition.

“The work on the exhibition Ancient Thrace and the Classical World: Treasures from Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece began back in 2018, when Dr. Timothy Potts, Director of the Getty, and Dr. Jeffrey Spier, at that time senior curator of the museum’s Antiquities collection, came to visit NAIM-BAS. During the preliminary talk, they presented their idea for an exhibition dedicated to ancient Thrace, which would be part of a series organized by the Getty Museum on different parts of the ancient world. So far, Egypt and the Ancient World (2018) and Ancient Iran and the Ancient World (2022) have taken place, and exhibitions on Phoenicia and Anatolia are forthcoming,” said Assoc. Prof. Dr. Margarit Damyanov from NAIM-BAS.

According to him, ancient Thrace occupies its natural place in this ambitious plan to present to the world, over the course of a decade, the interactions of different cultures in the Mediterranean and beyond. “Since the core of the ancient Thracian lands coincides with the territory of today’s Bulgaria, the Getty Museum sought a partnership with the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture and with NAIM-BAS, which is the oldest and leading institution in the field of research of the country’s ancient cultural heritage. After a lengthy preparatory phase and delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a tripartite agreement was signed in April 2023 between the Getty Museum, the Ministry and NAIM-BAS, according to which the two Bulgarian institutions are official co-organizers of the exhibition,” Damyanov explained.