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South on bul. Hristo Botev is another seventeenth-century tower, the Kula na Kurt Pashovtsi , and another modern plaza, pl. Hristo Botev, home to the Historical Museum ( Istoricheski muzei ; Tues-Sun 9am-noon & 2-5pm; US$1.50, ticket also valid for Ethnographic Museum), a gloomy concrete building which nevertheless holds an outstanding collection. Predictably, it harbours a "Botev Room" full of reminders of the warrior-poet's fateful march into Ottoman territory, but the real delights lie in the archeological section, which begins in the basement with hordes of Neolithic and Bronze Age idols, including well-endowed fertility figures. The display of Thracian artefacts upstairs kick off with finds from Mogilanskata mogila , a large tumulus unearthed in 1965. Three tombs were found here, dating from the fourth century BC, the largest of which contained a chieftain accompanied by two young women, both of whom appear to have suffered violent deaths at the time of the burial - possibly consorts of the deceased (one of them was sufficiently bejewelled to be a princess) who were required to accompany him into the afterlife. Three horses, two of them harnessed to a ceremonial chariot, completed the burial party. The latter were provided with decorative horse armour, their silver buckles depicting swirling animals. The more elaborately dressed of the women sported a pair of exquisitely filigreed earrings and a golden laurel wreath of great delicacy, featuring eighty finely sculpted leaves grouped around little berries. An adjacent cabinet displays one of the chieftain's greaves (metal shin-guards), engraved with the portrait of a tattooed Thracian warrior, flanked by fantastical-looking birds holding serpents in their beaks. However, the museum's pride and joy is the Rogozen treasure , a hoard of more than 100 silver vessels unearthed by a farmer in the village of Rogozen, near Vratsa, in 1985. This was in all probability a family treasure, accumulated by wealthy nobles of the Triballi tribe somewhere between 500 and 350 BC. Previously kept in the National History Museum in Sofia, the hoard was returned to Vratsa in 2000, and is now kept in a state-of-the-art, climate-controlled gallery on the top floor of the museum. The scenes that decorate many of the vessels portray typically Thracian concerns: hunting trips involving a variety of wild beasts, and archetypal goddess figures - one in a chariot drawn by winged horses, another riding a golden-headed lioness.
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