Category Archives: Bulgaria
Rambling around Sofia.
It’s always the same at a hostel. Why they insist on giving you a 20-minute monologue about the city I will never know. Pointless chat. Just hand me the keys to the room. Minging.
I don’t see a single person in the hostel building (for private rooms). I christen it the ‘Overlook Hotel’ and bash the bathroom door in with my e-cig. The hovel was dangerous, the Vertigo (1958) staircase a neck-breaking scenario waiting to happen. Thankfully I didn’t die, but I was terrified every time I went up or down the fucker.
Like all post-communist countries, it’s backward. Street urchins are everywhere, Bugsy Malone (1976) rejects wandering the alleyways in search of shrapnel and fags. Bar staff are just awful. They scowl and grimace – pure hatred in their eyes. And they do this to all tavern visitors. Taxi drivers are scam artists. It’s the usual let’s-drive-around-in-circles nonsense. Scum.
There were some highlights: I like the trams because they appear to be sent via DeLorean from the GDR in the ’70s. Also, the supermarket selection is eclectic. The Lidl was once again the crème de la crème. It was located slap-bang in the middle of a social realist nightmare of a housing estate, dirty-as-fuck matchbox apartments out of the age of Stalin.
The booze is cheap. The city is ugly. It’s cold. And that’s Sofia.
The Buzludzha monument.
No, that’s not a UFO or something out of Prometheus (2012); it’s the awfully baffling Buzludzha monument in Bulgaria, an admittedly futuristic remnant in the brutalist architectural style from the country’s wretched dalliance with communism. Like all pillars of the Eastern Bloc age, it reveals the hubris and folly of the state. No wonder that vast Soviet experiment went tits-up when instead of making the economics work, governments were concentrating on this nonsense. The thing, whatever it is, cost a fucking fortune.
The monument’s interior – mosaics of commie stalwarts – is closed to the public. The official line is that it’s now too dangerous to enter, but one suspects it’s frankly too embarrassing a spectacle.
It does reveal a truth, though – the lengths totalitarian states will go to awe the worker bees into submission.
Further reading:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/buzludzha-monument
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-forgotten-communist-monoliths-of-bulgaria
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 