A valuable donation enriched the exposition of the National Polytechnic Museum

Since July 26 2018 museum visitors can see an interesting piano produced in the years between 1936 and early 1940s by the German company Manthey - named after its founder Ferdinand Mantey. It was given to us by Stefan Mavrov. The donor has received the piano as a gift shortly before the end of the Second World War by his father - Professor Blagoy Mavrov, an internationally renowned Bulgarian scientist and polyglot - a philologist, encyclopedist, a remarkable portrait painter.

The instrument fully responds to the spirit of its time and to the high principles of industrial design of the 1930s - a search for usability, compactness and convenience. The design of the cast iron plate determines the comparatively small volume (it is only 90 cm tall). Even the lid of the keyboard is inside the corpus in the open position. In aesthetic sense, the piano have not any decorative elements, but at the same time it is extremely expressive with its elegant streamlined shapes that are very typical for the aesthetics of the interwar period. The model is in production until the 1970s.