The book you are opening is a touch on more or less familiar stories, events, and personalities from Bulgarian military history, preserved in the National Museum of Military History. Leafing through the layers of history through the hundreds of thousands of artifacts collected and studied with dedication and responsibility by the people who have worked in the museum throughout its hundred-year existence, the national narrative of Bulgaria and its army between war and peace will come to life before you.

Among the numerous cultural treasures are those that, for more than a century, have illustrated textbooks and books, exploring history and, in this sense, build the collective national memory and shape the identity of the Bulgarians. Many are the material testimonies, that carry the most emotional stories within the national narrative of the wars waged by Bulgaria, that have become an enduring source of Bulgarian pride.

The artifacts from the collection of the National Museum of Military History are witnesses of conflicts, wars, times of hardship, victories, and trials, loaded with heroic or traumatic memory and revealing the attitudes in society and the mechanisms of its modernization. Thousands are preserved testimonies about the ordinary person in the big history, unknown, but who have left a trace with deeds or shed blood, that we tell about in an effort to construct collective memory.

There are hardly many personalities from the high military command in the 140-year history of the Bulgarian Army whose belongings the museum does not possess. Аn undeniably significant fact are the preserved collections of Bulgaria’s heads of state, who have been commanders-in-chief of the army. Together, they build the vivid story of Bulgarian military history with the nuances loaded by time and political circumstances, and the expectations of society.

Called to preserve the rich history of the Bulgarian Army, the big family of the National Museum of Military History creates an indestructible bridge between past and present and preserves the traces of time that come to life on the pages of this catalog.