

Queues outside the Louvre in Paris in October, 2019. Photo: EPA/Christophe Petit Tesson

Bulgaria’s Minister of Culture Boil Banov announced on Monday afternoon that an exhibition of Bulgarian religious artefacts that were to be displayed at the Louvre Museum in Paris has been cancelled.

The decision is a result of a controversy that erupted after it was revealed that the exhibition would take place in a hall devoted to Islamic art and that the museum’s aim for the exhibition was to highlight the links between Christian and Islamic art.

The exhibition, entitled ‘Art and Cultures in Bulgaria between the 16th and 18th Centuries’, was due to be shown in Paris from June to November and was to feature 60 religious items including icons, manuscripts, books, jewellery and plates.

Bulgaria, a predominantly Christian Orthodox nation, was part of the Ottoman Empire in that era.

The Ministry of Culture’s decision came after a negative reaction from the Holy Synod and Emmanuil Mutafov, the director of the Institute for the Study of Arts at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, who claimed that the Louvre’s interpretation of historical events contained inaccuracies.

“The ‘interaction’ between Islamic and Christian art, almost nonexistent during this period, are marginal and on a purely decorative level,” Mutafov wrote in a statement published by artstudies.bg.

Another issue with the exhibition arose when it was revealed that the Holy Synod, the ruling body of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, had not given its blessing for the artefacts to be used in the exhibition.

The Holy Synod said that it did not agree that the artefacts could be taken from the monasteries and museums in which they are currently stored because they are still objects of worship.

After the decision to cancel the exhibition, Bulgarian art historian Klemena Antonova told Bulgarian National Radio that “it shows that people in Bulgaria are easily offended. However, more importantly, it shows a total misunderstanding on the part of the Louvre of Bulgarian history and culture.”

This would have been the third exhibition of Bulgarian art at the Louvre. The Ministry of Culture said it would pitch other ideas to the French museum such as ‘Prehistory – The Emergence and Development of the First European Civilisation’ and ‘Late Middle Ages – The Rise of the Second Bulgarian Kingdom’.