5 Days in Varna

Start at Kozirkata, the canopy by the cathedral where everyone in Varna arranges to meet, and at the Cathedral of the Dormition of the Mother of God, finished in 1886, a few years after Bulgaria's liberation. With its green and gold domes it's the city's symbol, modeled on Russian churches of the same time. Inside, it's dark and rich with frescoes and a carved iconostasis, and stained-glass windows.

Five minutes away, on Maria Luiza Boulevard, is the museum that makes Varna famous. The Varna Necropolis treasure is in the middle of it: more than 3,000 objects of gold, about 6 kg in all, buried around 4600-4200 BC by a culture that lived around the lakes here, some of it in symbolic graves with no body at all. One grave, of a man with a scepter and a gold sheath, is said to have held more gold than all the finds of that age from the rest of the world put together.

The rest of the museum is worth the time too: Greek and Roman Odessos, with gravestones, statues and jewelry, and a collection of icons upstairs.

Walk back through Independence Square, with the grand Opera and Drama Theater (1912-32), and down the pedestrian street that runs from the cathedral to the Sea Garden. It's lined with cafés and restaurants, and it's where Varna goes for its evening walk. Have a light lunch: a shopska salad and a bowl of tarator, the cold yogurt and cucumber soup.

In the old quarter by the port stand the Roman Thermae, built at the end of the 2nd century AD. They're the largest Roman building in Bulgaria and among the largest Roman baths in Europe, around 7,000 square meters, with walls that still rise up to 22 m.

A path leads you through the cold, warm and hot rooms, the furnaces and the changing rooms, and you can see the hollow floors where hot air ran. Odessos, founded by Greek settlers from Miletus in the 6th century BC, was a rich port, and these baths show it.

Around the baths is Gratskata mahala, the old Greek quarter, rebuilt in the early 20th century as a neighborhood of townhouses, museums and churches on top of the ancient city. Look in at the church of St. Athanasius, next to the baths, rebuilt in 1838 with a carved iconostasis of the Tryavna school, the Armenian church, and the small Sveta Bogoroditsa church from 1602, half sunk below street level, as churches under Ottoman rule often were, so as not to rise above the mosques. Down the hill is the port and the railway station, built in stages from 1908 to 1925. Varna was the end of Bulgaria's first railway, from Ruse, opened in 1866.

If you have time on a weekday (it's closed at weekends from October to May), the Ethnographic Museum on Panagyurishte street, in a house from the 1860s, shows folk costumes and crafts of the Varna region.

For dinner, try what the Black Sea gives. Order fried tsatsa, tiny sprats eaten whole with lemon, safrid (horse mackerel), and in autumn palamud, Atlantic bonito, grilled. Varna's other specialty is mussels (midi), farmed on the coast north of town, steamed with white wine or fried. A bottle of white wine from the region, a traminer or a dry muscat, goes with all of it.

Start by the main entrance of the Sea Garden, where the Naval Museum tells the story of Bulgaria's navy. Its star is in the yard: the torpedo boat Drazki (Daring), which on the night of 21 November 1912, during the First Balkan War, attacked the Ottoman cruiser Hamidiye off Varna and blew a hole in its side. The cruiser survived, but the attack became the navy's founding legend. The boat in the yard is in fact her sister ship Strogi, given the original's gun, funnel and fittings and renamed Drazki in 1957.

The Sea Garden (Morska gradina), which you now walk north through, is one of the largest seaside parks in Europe, begun in 1881 and shaped from the 1890s by the Czech gardener Anton Novák on the cliffs above the beaches. It's Varna's pride: shady alleys, fountains, statues, a small zoo, the Aquarium, built in 1911 and opened in 1932, and the Summer Theater, where the International Ballet Competition is held.

Walk along the Alley of Cosmonauts, where Yuri Gagarin planted a tree in 1961 and other cosmonauts followed. Further north is the Dolphinarium, opened in 1984 and the only one in Bulgaria. Animal welfare groups have long criticized it for its small pool, so whether you go is up to you.

Below the Sea Garden, the beaches start right at the edge of the center: the Central Beach, then a string of beaches separated by breakwaters (buni) running north. In summer they're full, with sunbeds, beach clubs and kiosks, and in the evening the promenade turns into one long bar. Look for the warm mineral showers along the beach, fed by hot springs, which locals use all year.

Outside the season, from October to May, the beaches are empty and the beach bars shut. Walk the promenade anyway, then spend the rest of the afternoon in the Sea Garden's indoor sights: the Natural History Museum (weekdays in winter, 5 EUR), the Aquarium and the Copernicus Planetarium of 1968, with its Foucault pendulum.

In summer, the beach promenade has a row of restaurants on the sand; out of season, eat at one of the fish restaurants in the center that stay open all year. Order a big pot of mussels, steamed with white wine and garlic or fried with a garlic sauce, a plate of fried fish and a cold Shumensko or Kamenitza beer, and watch the lights of the port. In summer, many of the bars turn into clubs after dinner.

Eight kilometers north of the center, Prince Alexander of Battenberg began a summer residence by the sea in 1882, and Ferdinand rebuilt it in the 1890s as a French-style palace where he and Boris III spent their summers. Euxinograd has the palace, a park with exotic trees and a sundial said to be a gift from Queen Victoria, and a winery from 1891 still making wine and brandy. It's now a government residence, so visits and tastings are by advance booking only.

If you haven't booked, go next door to the Ecopark Varna, the university botanical garden, with more than 300 species of trees and paths down to the sea.

Just beyond is the resort of Sts. Constantine and Helena, the oldest on the Bulgarian coast, which grew around a small monastery and its hot mineral springs. The monastery church still stands among the hotels, and the warm water fills several pools. In the season, it's a calmer alternative to Golden Sands.

In the woods above the coast, monks cut a monastery into a 25 m limestone cliff, with cells, a chapel, a kitchen and a church on two levels, linked by steps carved into the rock. Aladzha Monastery was home to a community of hermit monks from around the 12th century, perhaps into the 18th, and fragments of its frescoes survive. The name, given only in late Ottoman times, comes from the Turkish for colorful, probably for the paintings.

A path leads through the forest to the Catacombs, another group of caves cut into the rock. The small museum at the entrance tells the story.

Aladzha stands inside the Golden Sands Nature Park, a forest of oak, lime and ash with marked trails down to the coast. In November, start the walk by 3pm, before dusk. Walk down to the resort of Golden Sands, one of Bulgaria's three big resorts, with 3.5 km of beach. In summer it's a wall of hotels, clubs and crowds; out of season, it's almost deserted, and the beach is yours.

Take a bus back to Varna for the evening. From late June to mid-October, check the program of the Varna Summer International Music Festival, which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2026, with concerts in the Festival and Congress Center and other halls. Otherwise, the bars around the pedestrian street and the cathedral are the place for a drink.

In 681 the Byzantine emperor recognized the state of the Bulgars of Khan Asparuh, and tradition makes Pliska, on the open plain, its first capital; the stone buildings archaeologists have found are mostly later. What's left are the foundations of palaces, walls and a huge Great Basilica, built after Bulgaria became Christian in 864, part of which has been rebuilt. The scale is impressive, and the small museum explains how it all looked.

On a sheer cliff, 23 m above the ground, a horseman spears a lion, with a dog running behind and an eagle in front. The Madara Rider was carved in the early 8th century, probably to honor a Bulgar khan, with Greek inscriptions around it about the rulers of the time. It's the only rock relief of its kind in Europe, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and a national symbol: it's on Bulgaria's new euro coins.

Climb the 373 steps beside it to the plateau above for the view and the ruins of a fortress.

On the plateau above Shumen, a vast concrete monument was built in 1981 for the 1,300th anniversary of the Bulgarian state, with giant figures of the first khans and tsars and a mosaic inside. You see it from far away, and from up there you see half of northeast Bulgaria. Just below, the Shumen fortress has walls from Thracian to medieval Bulgarian times, and in the town, the Tombul Mosque from 1744 is the largest in Bulgaria.

Shumen is home to Shumensko, one of Bulgaria's best-known beers, brewed here since 1882, so buy a few bottles for the evening in Varna: Bulgaria's drink-driving limit is 0.5 per mille, and it's a motorway drive back. Have an early dinner in town before you go, with a kebapche or kyufte, the cumin-spiced grilled minced meat, and a kavarma, pork and vegetables baked in a clay pot. Varna is 1 hour 15 minutes away on the motorway.

Eighteen kilometers west of Varna, on a sandy plain, stand hundreds of stone columns, some up to 6-7 m tall and hollow inside, like a forest of broken pillars in a small desert. Nobody is completely sure how Pobiti Kamani formed, about 50 million years ago: the theories range from coral reefs to methane seeping through the seabed. A path leads around the main group.

On 10 November 1444, a crusader army of Hungarians, Poles and others, nominally led by the 20-year-old Władysław III, king of Poland and Hungary, with the Hungarian general John Hunyadi in command in the field, met the Ottoman army of Sultan Murad II outside Varna. The young king charged the sultan's guard and was killed, and Hunyadi's army broke, and the Battle of Varna ended the last great crusade against the Ottomans, nine years before Constantinople fell.

The park-museum stands on the battlefield, with two Thracian burial mounds, a cenotaph to the king, built into one of them in 1935, and a museum with arms and armor of the time. It's a pilgrimage site for Poles and Hungarians.

Cross the Asparuhov Bridge, 2 km long and about 50 m high, over the canal between the sea and Varna Lake, and drive or take bus 17 to Cape Galata, the headland that closes the bay of Varna to the south. Walk to the viewpoint for sunset (the old lighthouse is another 1.5 km east), with the whole city across the water, the port, the cathedral's gold domes and the Sea Garden. Below are the beaches of Galata and Fichoza, quieter than the city ones. If you come by bus 17, there's a long gap in the evening timetable, so plan a taxi back.

For the last night, after all the fish, go to a traditional mehana in the center for the inland classics: a shopska, kavarma in its clay pot, or lamb, with a bottle of dimyat, the native white grape of the Black Sea coast. Finish with kiselo mlyako, the famous Bulgarian yogurt, with honey and walnuts. Nazdrave.