Currently, the Regional History Museum – Montana has exhibition areas, premises for administrative needs and storage facilities in several buildings.
Most often, the museum in Montana is identified with the Exhibition Hall at 3 “Graf Ignatiev” Street. At the end of April 2018, in the fundamentally renovated building, the temporary exhibition “Montana through the centuries – weekdays and holidays” was arranged. Through the selected exhibits, the museum specialists emphasize the main trends in the development of the socio-economic and cultural-educational life of the region. The chronological scope of the exhibition is extremely wide – from the first evidence of human presence during the Chalcolithic (Stone-Copper Age) to the beginning of the new 21st millennium.
In addition to the one already mentioned, other temporary exhibitions are arranged in the Exhibition Hall of RIM-Montana, presented in detail on the specialized museum website.
Guests and residents of the city of Montana can continue their walk through time by visiting the other exhibition spaces of RIM-Montana: the so-called Michael’s House, the Lapidarium located next to it, and finally, but by no means least, the Kiril Petrov Art Gallery.
“Mihailovata Kashta” (Cherkovna St., No. 17) is the “oldest preserved building” with Renaissance architecture on the territory of today’s Montana. It began to function as a museum object in 1955 under the name “Hristo and Ivan Mihailovi House – Museum”. Currently, “Mikhail’s House” offers visitors the exhibition “In the World of Grandma and Grandpa”, created in 2001, presenting the urban and rural life in the area from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Due to restitution claims, in one of the rooms a “Patron’s Corner” has been set aside with furniture, books and photos related to different aspects of the personal life of the prominent communist functionary Hristo Mihailov, whose name the city bore until 1993.
The “Lapidarium” (Cherkovna St., No. 17) – an outdoor archaeological exhibition – includes 56 epigraphic monuments from the Roman era discovered in Montana. The artifacts are exhibited in a park environment (the so-called “Pope’s Garden”), located on an area of 700 m2 .
in the permanent exhibition of the “Kiril Petrov” Art Gallery (Tsar Boris III St., No. 17A): works of graphics, paintings and plastics, representing various stages of the development of Bulgarian fine art. These are works of “classics of Bulgarian painting” as well as of the “Plovdiv school of painting”. Among them are Ivan Mrkvichka, Yaroslav Veshin, Nikolay Pavlovich, Alexander Mutafov, Atanas Mihov, Vladimir Dimitrov-Maistora, Stefan Ivanov, Bencho Obreshkov, Ivan Milev, Georgi Bozhilov, Dimitar Kirov, Encho Pironkov. There are also works by contemporary authors – compatriots: Galilei Simeonov, Teodosi Antonov, Venelin Zahariev, Nikolay Penkov and others.
The exhibition space of the gallery is actively used for the presentation of various temporary exhibitions, it is the “host” of concerts, literary and local history readings, historical lectures, book presentations and much more.
