During the summer, the Rhodope Mountains are even more enchanting than in winter. Even after spending a week every summer there for a number of years, there are new places to discover, like an unusual museum I visited this summer in Chepelare.

I have never encountered anyone who would pass on the opportunity to enter a cave and peer into the dark secrets of underground beauties, to ponder the sights of quirky rocks and wonder at what water can accomplish during millennia of tireless work.

Quite the opposite, I know a lot of spelunkers. Some of them are professional speleologists, for whom crawling through caves is their job and life. For others, it is a hobby, but a serious one – these are the people taking courses on how to navigate and study the caves – and for them, equally, cave-crawling is their life. You can spot them by that certain fire in their eyes, their conversation is always made more interesting by that kind of intelligence peculiar to adventurers and discoverers. But that is a different story; this is about what they have accomplished.

Scientists have been exploring Bulgarian caves for decades. Clubs have been not just exploring caves, but setting up easier ways to access the underground passages.

Naturally, with such a long tradition of speleology, the creation of a museum was inevitable. Founded as the Bulgarian museum of Rhodope karst in 1980 by Chepelare native Dimitar Raichev, its name was changed several years later to the Museum of Speleology and Bulgarian karst.

The museum is in the Spelunker House, a big white building looking down from one of Chepelare’s mountainsides. The heartwarming welcome I received from the museum’s caretaker, typical for the Rhodope natives, melted any sort of city-dweller reservations I might have had.

Even before we made it in, our group received a free lecture, one that surely rivals the most expensive talks, with the caretaker excitedly addressing all our questions. Whatever lay ahead, I liked it already!

Appropriately, the exhibition halls were dark as a, well, cave. The exhibits are lit individually, some of them on show on the ceilings and others on the floor, to replicate the authentic atmosphere of a cave.

The museum is a treasure trove of minerals – limestone, karst, stalactites, crystal stalactites, corallites, cave pearls and lots of rocks.

Bats get their own place, but other exhibits on show include woodlice, crustaceans and the bones of animals found in the caves. One such exhibit shows the leg-bones, vertebrae and lower jaw of a leopard, dating back between 15 000 and 17 500 years, making it one of the latest finds of this kind in Europe. The museum has an upper jaw of a woolly rhinoceros, bones of prehistoric horses and bears.

A separate section is dedicated to cave archaeology, featuring about 100 paleolithic and eneolithic finds from caves inhabited by prehistoric humans – 26 caves in the Rhodope Mountains have shown indisputable proof of human habitation. From the earliest tools, made of stone, flint and bone to ceramics and bronze moulds, the museum offers an insight into humanity’s earliest stages of development.

The prized possession of the museum, however, is the skeleton of a cave bear, dating back 14 000 years. The Rhodope Mountains are the only ones to yield cave bear remains in Bulgaria, but this particular exhibit was pieced together several years ago by young spelunker Marin Gospodinov from thousands of bones found in Rhodope caves. Even for a layman, it is the starkest proof that prehistoric bears were much bigger and more developed than our contemporaries.

When I finally exited that cave atmosphere, it was with a clear awareness that I will be soon making more rounds of Bulgarian caves. Subconsciously, I started listing the ones I have been in and quickly realised how different they are one from another, but that is a topic best left for another time.

On my way out, I saw an elderly gentleman observe us with undisguised joy and the familiar fire in his eyes.

* The museum holds topical exhibitions and offers visitors guided tours in German, English, Russian and Bulgarian, as well as lectures on topics agreed in advance and video projections. Guides for cave tours are also available. The museum has a 60-seat conference hall.

Info

Museum of Speleology and Bulgarian Karst

Address: 7a Shina Andreeva Str, Chepelare

Tel:+359 3051 2041, +359 3051 304

Open: 9am-noon, 1.30pm-5.30pm
(closed on Mondays)