Hermann Škorpil

Who was Hermann Škorpil?

Václav Hermengild Škorpil was a Czech-Bulgarian archaeologist and museum worker credited along with his brother Karel with the establishment of those two disciplines in Bulgaria, as well as a geologist, botanist, architect and librarian.

Born in the city of Vysoké Mýto on 8 February 1858, he finished high school in Chrudim and Pardubice and graduated from the Technical University in Prague and in natural sciences from the University of Leipzig. From 1880 to 1906 he was a teacher at various Bulgarian cities: Plovdiv, Sofia, Sliven, Rousse and Varna, teaching natural history, geography, zoology, botany, arithmetic and the German language. He was the author of the first geologic map of Southern Bulgaria. In 1884, he founded a museum in Sliven, as well as a museum of natural sciences in Rousse in 1902. From 1906 to his death, he was the curator of the Varna Archaeological Museum. He died in the city where he spent much of his life with his brother, the Bulgarian Black Sea Coast port of Varna, on 25 June 1923. He was buried in an area near the city where he had unearthed an early Christian basilica.