93. Bulgaria’s Narrow Gauge Railway Winds Through History. Ivan Poulevski Helped Turn One of Its Station Stops Into a Museum.
Welcome to Museum Archipelago in Your Inbox, which does exactly what it says on the tin. Museum Archipelago, your audio guide to the rocky landscape of museums, is hosted by me, Ian Elsner.
In 1916, concerned that the remote Rhodope mountains would be hard to defend against foreign invaders, a young Bulgarian Kingdom decided to build a narrow gauge railway to connect villages and towns to the rest of the country. The Bulgarian King himself, Tsar Boris III, drove the first locomotive to the town of Belitsa to celebrate its opening. But the Septemvri - Dobrinishte Narrow Gauge Railway would far outlast the King and the Kingdom, the communist era that followed, and the rocky post-communst period.
Today, the railway is still a fixture of life in the region as a vital link to remote villages with no road access. But decades of neglect have left many stations crumbling. Train enthusiast Ivan Poulevski, a member of the organization “For The Narrow Gauge Railway,” helped found the House-Museum of the Narrow Gauge Railway in one of these abandoned stations. A sign on the building says the museum was built “for people, by people.”
In this episode, Poulevski describes the decision to build the museum using only volunteers, how to interpret multiple eras of Bulgarian history through the lens of a railway, and why they have had no plans to seek official museum accreditation in Bulgaria.
“I shouldn't be saying this, but we are not a legal museum because in Bulgaria we have a procedure to be a museum. It's pretty complicated. The regulations sometimes are left from years of socialism.” - Ivan Poulevski
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We've seen the small museum built in an abandoned structure before: on Mt. Vitusha, the Bear Museum used to be an abandoned forest shelter. Both museums don't have running water or electricity, and both have plans to install solar power systems in the future.
The idea is to put especially the children, the new generation, to put them in a real feelings to smell the forest, to feel the wind. The whole idea of the eco-education, forestry education to take out the children from the cities and to show them real nature and how they can walk around and even to have fun in the forest, not only in the cities. - Nikola Doykin
Archipelago at the Movies🍿Don't Eat The Pictures: Sesame Street at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1983)
This film is a journey. It's the journey of Cookie Monster, who learns that as much as he might want to eat the pantings, statues, and mummies in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he now understands how important it is not to devour them.
On this episode of Archipelago at the Movies🍿, we answer the question posed to Big Bird and Mr. Snuffleupagus, "where does today meet yesterday?", as we discuss 1983's Don't Eat The Pictures: Sesame Street at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Today me learn big lesson about museum etiquette.” - Cookie Monster