Roman Baths of Varna (Odessos Thermae): history, opening hours and tickets

The Roman baths of Varna are the ruins of the public thermae of Roman Odessos, built at the end of the 2nd century AD on more than 7,000 m² in today’s Greek Quarter. The Regional History Museum calls them the largest ancient public building found in Bulgaria. Tickets cost €4 for adults and €2 for pupils, and from October to May the site opens 10:00–17:00, closed on Sunday and Monday (prices, as of 29 October 2026).

What survives of the Odessos thermae?

The walls still rise up to 22 m in places, and the uncovered part includes all the main rooms of the baths (museum). By area, Wikipedia ranks them the fourth-largest preserved Roman baths in Europe, after the Baths of Caracalla and of Diocletian in Rome and the baths of Trier, and the largest in the Balkans. The museum classes them as “small imperial baths”: a public building where people bathed, but also met, ate and shopped.

They were used for only about a century, until the late 3rd century. Coins of Emperor Septimius Severus (193–211) found in the ruins help date them. Much later, in the 14th century, craftsmen set up workshops among the walls. For centuries the people of Varna knew the highest fragment as the “Roman Tower”, until the museum excavated the main part of the building between 1959 and 1971. Parts of it still lie under the surrounding streets.

Water came first: a bilingual Greek and Latin inscription, found in 1851, records that an aqueduct brought water to Odessos under Emperor Antoninus Pius, probably in AD 157. The wider story of the Greek and Roman city is in our history of Varna.

How do you walk through the rooms?

The plan is almost symmetrical, split by a north–south axis into an eastern and a western half (museum):

1. Entrances and vestibules. Bathers came in at the east and west ends of the north façade and went down three stone steps into two vestibules, which kept cold air away from the changing rooms.
2. Changing rooms (apodyteria). Among the largest halls in the building. Here clothes and valuables were left with slaves or attendants.
3. The bathing halls. Along the central axis lie the frigidarium (cold bath), tepidarium (warm) and caldarium (hot). Following Vitruvius, the heated rooms face south.
4. Sweat rooms and smaller warm rooms in the south, where air and water cooled step by step.
5. The heating system. The hypocaust is half sunk into the slope. It had a southern service gallery, six furnaces, two boiler rooms and four chimneys.
6. The edges. A latrine sat in the south-west corner of the western outer gallery, with its own door from the street, and small rooms around the building held taverns and shops.

The site is mostly open-air, so a dry day suits it best.

Opening hours and tickets (as of 2026-11-02)

	Hours	Days off
October–May	10:00–17:00	Sunday, Monday
June–September	10:00–18:00	none

Hours are from the museum’s winter notice of 1 October 2026 and its site page. Tickets: adults €4, pupils and students €2, children under 7 free; adults in groups over 15 pay €3, and a guided talk for up to 50 people costs €15. Entry is free on days set by the Ministry of Culture or Varna Municipality. Tickets are sold only at the box office: the museum does not sell online. Last winter every museum site was closed from 24 December to 4 January, so check museumvarna.com before a holiday visit. All Varna museum prices are in our museums table.

What about the Small Roman Baths?

Varna has a second, smaller bath site. The museum lists the Small Roman Baths separately and says they are not open to visitors; its winter notice also gives them as closed from 1 October to 31 May. On OpenStreetMap they sit about 200 m south of the main thermae, off 8-mi Noemvri Street. We found no official source for their date or size, so we leave those out.

How to combine the thermae with the old town on foot

The thermae stand at the corner of San Stefano and Han Krum streets in the Greek Quarter. Buses 20, 39 and 17A stop at Baseyna, the nearest stop (Visit Varna). On the map, both the Cathedral of the Dormition and the Archaeological Museum are under 1 km away in a straight line, so one easy loop is: cathedral → Archaeological Museum → down through the Greek Quarter to the thermae. Remember that from October to May the thermae and the Archaeological Museum both close on Sunday and Monday, so a winter Saturday works for both.

If you prefer a guide, Varna walking tours can be booked on GetYourGuide through the link on this page; we do not sell tickets ourselves. For the rest of the city, see the top 10 sights in Varna.