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

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

"Work on the exhibition Ancient Thrace and the Classical World: Treasures from Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece began in 2018 when Timothy Potts, director of the Getty, and Jeffrey Spier, then senior curator of the Museum's Antiquities Collection, came to visit NAIM-BAS. During the talks, they presented the idea for the exhibition dedicated to ancient Thrace, which will be part of a series organized by the Getty Museum on different parts of the ancient world. Egypt and the Ancient World (2028) and Ancient Iran and the Ancient World (2022) have participated, and exhibitions on Phoenicia and Anatolia are pending," said Margarit Damyanov from NAIM-BAS.

According to him, ancient Thrace takes its natural place in this ambitious plan to present to the world, over a decade, the interactions of different cultures in the Mediterranean and beyond.

14 Bulgarian museums participate in the exhibition. The biggest contributors are the National Archaeological Museum in Sofia, the Regional Archaeological Museum in Plovdiv and the Historical Museum "Iskra" in Kazanlak. Historical finds have also been provided by the regional history museums of Burgas, Veliko Tarnovo, Vratsa, Lovech and Targovishte, the historical museums of Karnobat, Nessebar, Septemvri, Strelcha, Sozopol and the National Museum of History.

The world's leading museums have also offered objects from their collections: the Louvre Museum in Paris, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Getty Museum.

"This regional cooperation, with a focus on the common cultural heritage of the Balkans, is only one of the aspects that make the exhibition of ancient Thrace and the classical world a very significant cultural and scientific event. The wonderful catalog with a circulation of 5000 copies, which has collected texts from prominent Bulgarian specialists, but also from researchers from Great Britain, the USA, Romania and Greece, will be widely distributed and will present the treasures of Thrace to the world. ancient and the achievements of the Bulgarian institutions in terms of their conservation and research", said Damyanov. /BTA