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Sofia is the capital and the biggest city of Bulgaria.

50,000

National Ethnographic Museum is housed in the premises of the former Royal Palace, a remarkable building in the center of Sofia from the end of the 19th century- a monument of culture. The Northeastern wing of the former Royal Palace in Sofia was built between 1894 and 1895. It was designed by an Austrian Fredrik Gryunanger (1856-1929), the court architect of the King Ferdinand.

The Museum's collections are organized under several items: clothes, goldsmithery, copper objects, agriculture, woodcarving, home furnishing, ceramics, fabrics and embroideries, carpets, ritual objects, foreign art, and etc. Over the past fifteen years, the museum has shown, independently or jointly with other museums, more than 50 exhibitions in Bulgaria and abroad.

The Ethnographic Museum was founded in 1892 as a department of the Popular Museum. It became an independent museum in 1906 with the collections of works of traditional Bulgarian handicrafts, costumes, fabrics, carpets, embroideries, musical instruments, objects of the interior decoration as well as of farming tools, and etc . Since 1949, the Ethnographic Museum has been a part of the system of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences under the umbrella of the Ethnographic Institute.

The museum collection today treasures more than 50,000 exhibits, which are the samples of the Bulgarian traditional folk arts and crafts collected from all territories historically inhabited by Bulgarians over the period from the mid-17th to the mid-20th centuries. Based on all of above, it was given the status of a National Ethnographic Museum (NEM) in 1969. The Museum's mission is to collect, to preserve, and to exhibit the ethno-cultural heritage of the Bulgarians and the other ethnic groups, which have inhabited the Bulgarian Lands.