site.btaFirst Vratsa Tourist Association Celebrates 125 Years Since Its Foundation

Veslets Tourist Association, which is the first such association in Vratsa, celebrated its 125th anniversary on Tuesday, said Valentina Lyubomirova, curator at the Vratsa Regional History Museum.

She recalled that on April 29, 1900, about 40 nature lovers gathered to found a tourist association together. This act marked the beginning of the organized tourist movement in Vratsa and the Vratsa Region. In May of the same year, 22 people created a charter during the first organized excursion to the St. Ivan Pusti Monastery above the village of Bistrets.

Lyubomirova emphasized that in the first years after the establishment of Veslets, the association directed its activities towards popularizing gymnastic exercises and, specifically, the game football.  The Minister of Public Education even sent a gymnastics teacher to Vratsa, who began to work as an instructor for the local youth. Balls, clubs, sticks, and dumbbells were purchased to encourage gymnastic exercises, and the school's gymnasium was used as well, Lyubomirova noted.

She said that Veslets had a choir and developed cultural and mass activities, with the income from the performances used to increase the association's fund. By the beginning of 1902, there were 62 registered regular payers of the association and 51 permanent members. Veslets was mainly developed by people from the intellectual elite of the region, including teachers, doctors, judges, pharmacists and architects, Lyubomirova said.

She pointed out that in June 1900, the tourist association organized and documented the first entry into the Ledenitsata cave (known today as Ledenika), which had been known since the time of Ottoman rule, when it was used by shepherds to store milk. "This made the Vratsa tourists the first modern cavers in Bulgaria", Lyubomirova argued. She also said that the Vratsa tourists became the first in Bulgaria in organizing an excursion for scientific research purposes, as they set out in the footsteps of Hristo Botev's detachment in order to enrich the knowledge about what happened in the depths of the Vratsa Balkans during the April Uprising of 1876.

For this purpose, a visit was made to the Vola area in September 1900, with Stefanaki Savov, the leader of the Uprising in Vratsa Region, invited to lead the expedition group. As a result of the trip, the first official commission was formed with the participation of Savov and Vratsa tourists in 1901, which aimed to establish in detail the path of the detachment and the place of Botev's death. "Local tourists have a merit in clarifying the events that took place in the Vratsa Balkans in May 1876 and in shedding new light on the previously unclear history", Lyubomirova underlined.

The tourist association organized the afforestation of the previously bare Kaleto hill above Vratsa, as well as the improvement of the tourist trails in the Balkans by placing signs and cleaning the forest trails. 

On August 8, 1925, the 25th anniversary of the founding of Veslets was solemnly celebrated with the foundation stone for the construction of the Tourist's House on the Kaleto hill was laid. The hut was officially opened on November 8, 1926 and established itself as the second cultural centre in Vratsa after the people's community centre.

On the occasion of the 125th anniversary, a temporary exhibition corner was opened in the Vratsa Regional History Museum.