ARCHITECTURE OF BULGARIA

During all the periods of developing the human civilization the architecture has accompanied and helped its processes, because the physical surviving itself of the human communities is impossible out of artificial environment, creating which is a main goal and a task of the creative activities, called architecture. The architecture is a vast and hard art, not just because of the huge range it covers, but also because of the complicated principles, thanks to which it achieves its own creative goals. Coming over it can’t be done at one stroke, and there is not a moment in which the architect can say that he knows “all” the secrets of the architecture art. As many roads are leading towards understanding the nature of this art and mastery of its peculiar instruments as according to the saying are leading towards Rome. The goal of this studying course is not to prepare architect-creators, but to mark the first steps in front of the art critics, which later inevitably will confront difficulties “reading” the architecture texts and they will have to handle them themselves, because there are no exact “receipts” for understanding of the architecture language. The way the studying material is presented, corresponds to the character of the architect reality. It is a result of the conviction that the theory of the architecture and the history of the architecture are just the two sides of the same coin. The theoretical settings always rely on historical architecture material, which covers everything already done, no matter its time, size and shape, and creating architecture objects is impossible without rationalizing them within the wide boarders of knowledge, i.e. without theory. The Bulgarian historical legacy is used as an experimental material, unfortunately within the framework set by the accepted studying programs of NHA – until the end of XIX century. The studying material is subdivided into seventeen chapters, different by their size, devoted to different periods and problems of the architecture history and theory. If this approach to the architect reality awakes the students, preparing to be future historians of the art, to a sense of interest and stimulate them to filling the gaps in their education, the author will have enough reasons to consider her job as finished.