One of the Best Soviet-Car Museums Is Hidden in a Bulgarian Mall
Whether you’re into cars, birds, architecture, or 17th-century poetry, there’s rarely a good reason to stop by a mall when you’re traveling in a foreign country. Broadly speaking, a mall is a multi-story monument to globalization where authenticity, true cultural immersion, and adventure are nowhere to be found. Spoiler alert: You’ll find pretty much the same stores in malls in Abu Dhabi, Salt Lake City, Shanghai, and Rome.
And yet, last month I found myself standing in front of a pickup-tall map of a giant mall in Varna, Bulgaria, with friends and fellow journalists Andrew Ganz and Murilee Martin. We weren’t looking for the Hot Topic; my days of wearing Blink 182 shirts ended about 20 years ago. We were there to visit the Retro Museum.
I parked our rented Renault Mégane next to a tattered Mercedes-Benz W124, took the escalator up to the first floor, and walked past the type of holiday decorations you’d expect to find in a posh neighborhood in the Midwest. Christmas music quietly filled the space as holiday-crazed shoppers made their way from one store to the next like robotic ants. What the hell? Is this really where we’re supposed to be? Or did the mall replace the museum? I had doubts until I saw the big “Ретро Музей” (“Retro Museum”) sign.
After paying 15 Lev (about $8) to get in, Murilee, Andrew, and I unexpectedly walked into one of the greatest museums dedicated to the cars built by the Soviet Union and its various satellites. The contrast hits you before you can take in the cars: Two minutes ago, we were in a mall with upbeat music and bright lights. The museum is comparatively dim inside, either unheated or not heated at all, depending on the room. Old Soviet music plays over the speakers.
Figuring out where to start wasn’t easy. The museum claims its collection includes over 50 cars, but I’d bet the few Lev coins that made it home with me in my back pocket that the real number lies in three-digit territory. It helps that the cars are neatly arranged in little islands. Polski-Fiat models are lumped together, pre-Volkswagen Škoda models get their own displays, there’s an entire side dedicated to the Lada brand, and the ZAZ Zaporozhets were given their own nook as well.
It’s not just cars, though: there are also motorcycles, mopeds, model cars, and thousands of Soviet-era objects including gaming consoles, packs of cigarettes, televisions, and typewriters. If it’s old and Soviet, it’s on display in this Macy’s-style mall.
The highlights are too numerous to list. Above all, what’s fascinating is that none of the cars displayed in the museum were particularly rare when new. There’s nothing special about a Lada Niva (you can still buy one new today!), a Škoda 1000 MB, or a Trabant 600. Most of these cars were designed at the request of central planners, or by state-owned firms, targeting people who didn’t have much in the way of cross-shopped options. No one at Wartburg gave a damn whether you liked the 353’s two-stroke fumes, because just getting one took so long that you were absolutely thrilled just to have a new car to carry your family in. These cars were mass-produced with indifference and mass-destroyed with the same indifference, and that’s what makes the museum so interesting. Even in rural Bulgaria, or deep in Slovakia, clean ex-Soviet cars are hard to find.
Where else can you check out a Zaztava GT55 that’s in better shape than when it was new? Every cars-and-coffee-style event in the world is going to have an air-cooled Porsche 911 and a Ford Mustang, but I don’t know where else to send you if you want to see a perfect example of every ZAZ model built, neatly arranged to give you a sense of how this little rear-engined two-door evolved. There are a few rarities, like a black GAZ-13 Chaika limousine (which, grimly, spent years as the car of choice for KGB agents), but 98% of the museum stands out as a celebration of the acceptable, the tolerable, and the just-OK.
So, yeah… I flew to Bulgaria to spend time in a mall. It was amazing!
