GRAND EASTERN-EUROPEAN EXPEDITION 3: BUZLUDZHA

“Our world, like a charnel-house, lies strewn with the detritus of dead epochs.”

               – Le Corubiser, The City of Tomorrow

A silhouette of concrete rises up before the summer sky. Winds sweep through the mountainous grasslands and the sun and elements beat down over the decades, yet here stands a monument out of time. The Buzludzha feels like history itself melted down and reformed into concrete and steel rebar.

The Buzludzha Monument was built to commemorate the foundation of socialism in Bulgaria and to serve as the headquarters of the Bulgarian Communist Party. After the fall of the communist government in Bulgaria, the structure has been left to decay.

I was overjoyed to see the monument- I’d gotten pretty sick back in the nearby town of Veliko Tarnovo over the last few days and had been afraid I wouldn’t be able to make it. Fortunately I felt good enough that morning to crawl out of the hostel, so we rented a car and ventured out onto the Bulgarian highways. The monument was built far away from any populated areas in a mountain pass, so we had to navigate through some obscure backroads to get there. We thought we were getting lost when we turned a corner, and then all of a sudden there it was- a massive concrete UFO saucer.

The hands of some forgotten giant.

We’d heard claims back in town that the police had won a long-running game of cat-and-mouse with urban explorers at the Buzludzha, finally managing to seal off the last of the entrances. Fortunately this turned out to be quite untrue! We slid through a crack in the concrete and lowered ourselves into the depths of the structure.

After climbing a few meters underground, we put our feet down in a room that looks like it was once a big storage closet. There’s a deathly silence about the place. Climbing into the foundations of this cavernous building feels like entering a crypt- tomb robbers in the graveyard of utopia.

The bowels of the building are cluttered with electrical panels and ventilation shafts. The pictures didn’t come out very well, but if you’d like you can see them here and here. Like a lot of the Buzludzha, the basement looks like the decaying remnants of some science-fiction starship, halfway between a forgotten past and an unrealized future.

We slowly navigate our way through this metal labyrinth and find staircases climbing up the structure. Eventually, we ascend into the main room.

As we emerge from the dark underground sections into the main room, we’re bathed in light and kaleidoscopic color. The beams of light fall like they’re cutting through jungle canopy, glittering off spectacular murals composed of tens of thousands of individual 1×1 cm glass squares. Everywhere you hear the sound of water dripping and then echoing throughout the huge space.

“Proletarians of all countries, unite!”

The place space feels (maybe by design or maybe not) sacred, like you’re inside a cathedral. A temple for a now-vanished god, a mausoleum for dead ideologies, a modern mecca for urban explorers.

We follow passages out of the main room and find huge banks of windows, looking out on the surrounding mountains and valleys.

The Buzludzha is probably the most otherworldly place I’ve ever been in my life. This monolith is one of those things that simply doesn’t seem like it’s from our reality, a location lost in space and definitely in time. It makes me incredibly sad to see this place falling apart, but at the same time I can’t imagine it looking any more beautiful than it does in decay.

We spend a few more hours exploring this fantastic fever dream of metal and concrete, soaking in the atmosphere before heading back down the pass and continuing our journey.

GRAND EASTERN EUROPEAN EXPEDITION 2: STRANGE SOUNDS IN THE CONCRETE HALL

Stony soldiers and concrete women look out on the Black Sea.

Sitting atop a hill in Varna, Bulgaria is the Monument of the Bulgarian-Soviet Friendship.

Built in the 1970’s to commemorate unity between Bulgaria and Russia, it’s been left to decay since the collapse of the USSR. Pictures online show the ‘Staircase of Victors’ covered by hundreds of Communist Party officials back at its opening ceremony- these days it seems to be visited only by people jogging up and down the steps, walking their dog, or interested in the ruin.

The first time I wandered over to the monument it was after a day of drinking on the beach. My fellow traveler went back to the hostel to take a nap and I walked along the shore until I saw the monument, and then climbed up the stairs to get a closer look. When I saw the opening at its center, I was very surprised- I didn’t guess it had an interior at all, much less an accessible one!

I squeeze through the grate and stumble in. The sounds of the city vanish immediately once inside. Turning my flashlight on reveals a flight of concrete stairs going up into the structure.

As I go up the steps, a tablet with Bulgarian text etched into it materializes. I can’t read Bulgarian, but later on I asked a friend who can to help with deciphering what was left of the text. He said it looked like a poem, reading something like “The Soviet Union and Bulgaria are as important to each other as the sun, air, and water are to a living thing.”

As one moves away from the light coming in through the entrance, the steps keep splitting off and heading in different directions, and with only a phone it’s very dark. Eventually I come out into a large atrium with many openings heading into other rooms and hallways. While standing there I hear a rustling noise, what sounds like somebody standing up in one of the rooms. I freeze- it was at that point that I realized it was probably a bad idea to enter an easily-accessed urban ruin in the middle of the city with nothing but a phone, and to admittedly be a little inebriated while doing it. I promptly turned around and got out.

The next day, I went back (sober) with a more powerful flashlight and cautiously ventured a little further into the building. Taking a turn around a wall I hadn’t dared go past the day before, I find this room:

The dimensions of the room, the light coming down from above, and the short steps going up to a little platform give the place the feeling of a small chapel. The huge star cut out of the wall dominates the space.

There’s a rustling noise again, but this time I notice it’s coming from above- the noise that’d spooked me the day before were just some pigeons nesting in the rafters! I leave the star/pigeon room and keep going up the building.

The whole place has an off-kilter, unsteady atmosphere. I think it comes down to something with the layout and design feeling just a little bit * off * – the surfaces in the building never quite align perfectly, the walls and ceilings are all angled, the windows and stairs appear in unexpected places. The building teases at symmetry and then gives you asymmetry, creating a sort of uncanny valley effect of geometry.

One of the staircases zigzags out of the dark and up to the roof.

I go back inside to explore the interior some more. No matter how many times I walk through the different rooms, it still seems like a maze and it still feel like I’m stumbling into new chambers. Standing in the room I ended up thinking of as the ‘main atrium’ and looking at all the shadowy rooms and hallways leading off into darkness, I realize that the building feels much, much bigger on the inside than on the outside. Either it hides its size very well on the outside or it’s the concrete, communist version of House of Leaves.

Sometimes I listen closely and think that I can hear a kind of hum, the muted echoes of far-off conversations. Are there people outside, or are there words from decades ago trapped inside and reverberating off the walls?