The first village museum of street art in the world opened doors a few days ago in Staro Zhelezare, a small village near Plovdiv. The exposition features original photographs taken during the StreetArt festival in Staro Zhelezare since 2013.

The idea belongs to a Bulgarian-Polish family of artists who have, for years, been painting pictures on the white walls of the houses together with their students from Poland.

Katarzyna and Ventzislav Piryankov live in Poznan where they run an art school for university applicants, but they spend their summers in Ztaro Zhelezare where Ventzi inherited a house. Over the course of time they turned their village home into an art camp where they invite their students. Every summer young Polish artists come here to give free rein to their imagination, using the walls of the village houses as the canvas for their paintings. About 10 years ago their work put Staro Zhelezare on the tourist map of Bulgaria, and now, the village museum of street art is about to put the village on the world map of street art.

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• Staro Zhelezare village once again hosts Street Art Village Festival
• Staro Zhelezare – the village with a spatter of artistic “augmented reality”

“This year we decided to have a street art museum. We wanted to have everything that has been happening over the past 10 years concentrated in one place – lots of photographs of life in the village, of our first years here, of all events connected with art,” says Katarzyna Piryankova, in an interview with the Bulgarian news agency BTA.

The artists use acrylic paints and spray. Musicians, actors, scientists, politicians come to life on the walls of Staro Zhelezare’s houses. For example, in one picture Queen Elizabeth II is next to granny Velika from the village, in another – Ivan stands next to Barack Obama. This year’s motto is: Travels known and loved. The newest paintings in Ztaro Zhelezare, the work of nine artists from Poland, depict characters from adventure movies like Indiana Jones, Jack Sparrow, or Forrest Gump seated on a bench next to a Bulgarian granny.

“We see it as socially engaged art – the kind of art that has a bond with the people and addresses them,” says Katarzyna Piryankova for the BTA. It is the kind of art that brings a smile to people’s faces, she says, that gives food for thought, that shows us what are the things that matter and what makes us happy.  

Compiled by Veneta Nikolova

Translated and posted by Milena Daynova

Photos: BTA