Museum of History, history museum in Samokov, Bulgaria

The Samokov History Museum occupies a building designed by architect Yordan Yordanov in the late 1930s, with its first stone laid in 1940 by Prime Minister Bogdan Filov and completed after World War II. Its five collections hold about 30,000 exhibits, displayed across two floors and an outdoor lapidarium.

The museum was founded in 1930 on the initiative of Samokov artists Naum Hadzhimladenov, Vasil Zahariev, Hristo Yonchev-Kriskarets, Pavel Franzaliyski, Slavi Genev and Georgi Belstoynev. It was officially recognised by the Ministry of Education in 1936, and the ethnographic collection began in 1937. The building, designed by architect Yordan Yordanov, had its first stone laid in 1940 by Prime Minister Bogdan Filov and was completed after World War II; the museum has occupied it since 1943.

The museum's name recalls the Samokov craftsmen: the wooden hammer and bellows models called "samokovo", driven by the waters of the Iskar, are displayed on the ground floor. The ethnographic rooms show 19th-century town dress, belts, jewellery and wooden stamps for printing fabrics, while the courtyard holds a Thraco-Roman sarcophagus from the 2nd–3rd century and sculptures of Zahari Zograf and Nikola Karastoyanov.

The museum stands behind the "Otec Paisiy" community centre in Samokov, in its own building designed by architect Yordan Yordanov. Exhibits are arranged by floor: Thracian and late antique ceramics and the ethnographic collection on the ground floor, the art and icon collection on the second. A small open-air lapidarium in the courtyard holds a Thraco-Roman sarcophagus from the 2nd–3rd century.

The museum keeps the first printing press in Bulgaria, built in 1828 by Nikola Karastoyanov, the founder of Bulgarian printing. Its documents include a copy of the first Bulgarian magazine, Lyuboslovie, printed by Konstantin Fotinov in 1844, and Karastoyanov's mutual-instruction table of 1846.