site.btaKazanlak Art Gallery Reports 20% More Visitors in 2025

The Art Gallery in Kazanlak is celebrating a very positive year in 2025, in which the flow of visitors has increased by over 20% compared to 2024, Art Gallery Director Plamen Petrov told BTA in an interview on Tuesday.

He emphasized that there are more and more young people among the visitors and pointed out that the most valuable thing is how the art gallery team has managed to prove that there can be cultural life and events in a city like Kazanlak even on Saturdays. "I am extremely pleased that we have managed to attract a young audience, because this is the audience in which we need to invest the most effort and make them recognize the art museum," Petrov said. 

The art gallery recently presented new audio guides recorded by children, which aim to show the public that talking about art is not complicated. “On the other hand, these are the children of Kazanlak, this is a living archive that remains,” he stressed. Currently, the team is working to supplement the guides with recordings of other children who are learning English, so that they can be used by foreign guests as well.

Dozens of exhibitions, lectures, workshops and other initiatives have been held in 2025, which have attracted different audiences, he noted, adding that the gallery had BGN 420,000 from the municipal budget and BGN 250,000 from its own contribution. "With our activities, I hope above all that we will succeed in establishing Kazanlak as a city of artists. In showing that the city also has something to show in terms of visual art in addition to the past and present that is here, along with rose production and the Thracian heritage," Petrov pointed out.

He announced that the construction of the Savremie depot, where the artists of Kazanlak will be presented and on which the team has been working for a long time, should be completed by the end of 2025, and its official presentation is due at the beginning of 2026. "According to art critics in our country, and not only, there are not many opportunities for the public to experience contemporary art and be able to communicate in close proximity with the authors, which is the idea of ​​the Savremie depot", the Art Gallery Director noted, adding that the intention is to start live meetings with every artist of Kazanlak in 2026 and to document them. "This way, they will become an audiovisual archive, which in years to come will be extremely valuable for people after us and will preserve living knowledge about them," he said.

The footage will be uploaded online, and every visitor to the depot or collector will be able to obtain the coordinates of the respective artist. "Our main goal is to try to improve the dialogue between the audience and the artists, because only in this way will we be able to shorten the distance between the audience and art," Petrov emphasized. He also stated that the Marble Hall in the Dechko Uzunov House Museum will be provided to the local structure of the Union of Bulgarian Artists, where they themselves can build their own exhibition plan, with the exhibitions to be held entirely with the cooperation and technical assistance of the gallery team. 

"Dechko Uzunov himself said that nothing in this house should remind you of a museum, as he is alive. So we are trying to show that the artist as a figure is a living part of the fabric of the local community in Kazanlak," Petrov pointed out. The Nenko Balkanski House Museum will continue to develop as a territory for young people who are interested in art, with several debuts coming up there, while the central part of the art gallery will be set up as a space in which to display what is stored in the depots. It is not small at all, the director emphasized and noted that the gallery's art collection consists of about five thousand works, of which only 200 are currently on display.

"Without communicating with this heritage, somehow the knowledge about it disappears and at some point we may own dozens of mute works of art," Petrov stressed, adding that this is the reason the art gallery team organizes so many lectures. He expressed hope that in 2026 there will be an opportunity to continue the Saturday at the Gallery on the Road initiative in different cities in the country.

"The entire 2026 will be marked by the 125th anniversary of the art gallery," the director said, noting that numerous activities are planned in the city and beyond, including the gallery's first participation in the Apollonia Arts Festival in Sozopol. On the occasion of its anniversary, the art gallery in Kazanlak will also implement the 125 Dialogues with Art project under the Cultural Heritage 2025 programme of the Culture Ministry and the National Culture Fund. It will feature 125 residents from the city who will talk about how they perceive one painting from the institution's collection.