Etar Ethnographic Open-Air Museum

An open-air museum eight kilometres from Gabrovo, opened in 1964 and the first of its kind in Bulgaria. Along the banks of the river Yantra a street of a mid-nineteenth-century Revival-era town has been recreated: a couple of dozen houses with overhanging upper storeys, stone-built ground floors and wooden galleries, with a cobbled roadway and a humpbacked stone bridge between them. The main feature is the working water-powered machinery. A channel diverted from the river turns the mill wheels, and from them drives run to a fulling mill, a grindstone, a groats mill and a felting frame; all of it operates, and the visitor sees not a model but production. In the shops along the street craftsmen are at work - a potter, a coppersmith, a knife-maker, a baker, selling what they make in front of you. Standing apart is a clock tower whose clock was assembled without a single metal part apart from the mechanism. Walking round takes a couple of hours; in winter some of the machinery is shut down.

Address

ul. Ilevska, Gabrovo

On the map