The antique Villa Armira near the town of Ivaylovgrad, restored with European funding will be a candidate for the UNESCO World Heritage List, Deputy Minister of Culture Associate Prof. Dr. Boni Petrunova has announced.  It is considered to be the wealthiest private palace from the Roman period, excavated in what are today Bulgarian lands. It was built in the second half of the 1^st c. AD by a renown Thracian landlord. The huge two-story building spreads across an area of 2,132 m2 – with a panoramic terrace and many premises. There used to be 22 of those on the ground floor only, surrounding a pool with size 11x7 m. Traces of a Roman type of a heating system can be spotted today as well. During the first half of 2^nd c. AD there was a workshop for the artistic decoration of the sparkling white marble, extracted in the region.

Craftsmen from the Afrodisia town in Asia Minor were invited there, as the place was famous for being the most important school for sculpture worldwide across the Roman epoch. Thus the villa was turned into a true palace of the Roman empire, perfectly decorated with beautiful marble slabs and canvases covering the whole place. The mosaics from the landlord’s bedroom are particularly precious, as the portrait of one of the owners and his two children has been depicted there. These are the only portraits on mosaics from the Roman epoch, discovered in Bulgaria so far. “This unique monument has all the necessary qualities to be the new Bulgarian UNESCO proposal,” Boni Petrunova underlined.