National museum

THE NATIONAL MUSEUM

The National Museum is located in the Robev family house, a masterpiece of 19th century Ohrid town architecture, in Tzar Samuel street which contains the rare surviving houses in the hilly part of the town designed by builders from the surroundings of Debar.

There has been a museum in Ohrid since the beginning of the 16th century when it was the Archiepiscopal Museum (dismantled in 1916) housed in St. Bogorodica Perivlepta’s Church.

The present museum was set up in 1951 and is one of the few museums in Macedonia whose collection is housed in several different premises: In the one - time Robev and Urania houses in that in which the Ilinden revolutionary Hristo Uzunov was born, in the administrative building of the Institute and the Museum and in the St. Bogorodica Perivlepta’s Church Museum complex, which houses the Gallery of Ohrid Icons from the 11th to the 19th centuries and the Permanent Exhibition of Slavonic Literacy.

The National Museum’s archeological collection contains findings dating from prehistoric times and from the classical and mediaeval periods of Ohrid’s history. It also possesses a rich collection of Ohrid’s icons, a numismatic collection of c. 9000 coins dating from the classical period and right up to the later Middle Ages and various items and documents from the period of the Rebirth, the Ilinden Uprising and the National Liberation War.