Visit of Prof. Karol Marhold to the National Museum of Natural History, Sofia

On 20 July 2026 the renowned Slovak botanist Prof. Karol Marhold, a senior researcher at the Center for Plant Sciences and Biodiversity at the Slovak Academy of Sciences and currently as well a full professor of botany at Charles University in Prague visited the National Museum of Natural History, Sofia at the invitation of Sen. Assist. Dr Salza Palpurina. Prof. Marhold met with Prof. Pavel Stoev, Director of the Museum, and he donated the first type specimen in the museum’s Herbarium in its recent history.

The Department of Botany at the museum was established on April 1, 1919, but in 1947, during the reorganization of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, all historical herbarium collections were transferred to the newly established Institute of Botany of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. In 1974, the museum began to build independent botanical collections again, and the modern herbarium (BNHM) has undergone particularly strong development in recent years. Today, the collection of higher plants in the museum includes over 6 000 specimens, with over 15 000 materials in its backlog, collected mainly from the territory of Bulgaria. Since 2022, a large-scale reorganization and digitization of the fund has been underway within the framework of the national infrastructure DiSSCo-BG. Thanks to this activity, the herbarium not only preserves its specimens, but also actively makes them accessible to the scientific community in Bulgaria and around the world.

Type specimens are the scientific standard on which the description and name of each new taxon are based. For this reason, they are among the most valuable objects in any natural history collection. The donation of Prof. Karol Marhold represents an important step in the development of the BNHM Herbarium and recognition of its scientific activity and international visibility.

We thank Prof. Karol Marhold, for this valuable contribution and for his long-standing work on the flora of Bulgaria and the Balkan Peninsula.