You know those documentaries and photo shoots that focus on 'abandoned places', and take you through a catalogue of them? Yeah, well, I've now got a new respect for the people who film those things ... not so much for what they do (which I admired already), but just for their ability to actually get to those locations.
Of course, they do have cars. And production crews. And budgets. But still.
Let me explain how this new feeling of admiration came about.
As you may know, I've had this little obsession for a while with 'Communist flying saucers' – those buildings you occasionally see in the FSU* and Eastern Europe that look like concrete UFOs. And the best of these (at least in my view) is a place called The Buzludzha Monument, in the mountains of Bulgaria.
I'm planning to tell you about Buzludzha in some detail, for two reasons: first, it will help make sense of the things I've been doing over the past couple of days; and second, I just find it incredibly interesting.
(Too interesting, some may say ... but screw them. They clearly aren't acquainted with the joys of surrendering oneself to a nice random obsession every once in a while.)
Let's start with the bare biographicals:
Buzludzha's construction was completed in 1981, so it's a relatively recent building. It was designed to serve as the Headquarters of the Bulgarian Communist Party.
Here's the thing, though: if you're gonna build a Headquarters of The Bulgarian Communist Party, the sensible place to put it would of course be somewhere nice and central in downtown Sofija. That way, it'd be an easy commute for party members, and for anyone else who had occasion to go there. But at the time when the monument was conceived, there were other factors to consider.
See, up until about 120 years earlier, Bulgaria had been part of the Ottoman Empire, along with most of the Balkans. But during the 1870s this arrangement all began to fall apart. There were uprisings in Herzegovina and Bosnia, and these inspired the Bulgars to revolt as well. The Ottoman response was brutal, with tens of thousands massacred as they put down the insurrections.
When news of this spread through Russia, it provoked a huge wave of sympathy for the Bulgarian cause, coupled with a surge in 'Pan Slavism'. Dostoyevsky, for example, led a movement that insisted Slavic peoples should be freed from their oppressors and then 'united', with Russia (naturally) as their protector and guide.
All of this was a major contributing factor in what became known as the Russo-Turkish war, fought in both the Caucases and the Balkans. One of the decisive battles of that war took place on the Shipka Pass – an eastern high point of the vast Stara Planina mountain range, which dominates central and western Bulgaria as well as eastern Serbia. There, Russian and Bulgarian troops stood side-by-side along the mountain ridges and repelled the Turkish forces. It proved to be a turning point, and not long after that the Sultan was forced to relinquish control over Bulgar territories, signing an agreement that guaranteed their independence.
(This, btw, may go some way towards explaining why present-day opinions about Russia are somewhat more positive in Bulgaria than they are in other parts of Eastern Europe. But that's another story.)
About 20 years later, in 1891, a gentleman by the name of Dimitar Blagoev called a meeting of prominent Marxists and socialists from around Bulgaria. As a venue, he chose a peak in the Shipka Pass, very close to where the Russians and Bulgars had seen off the Turks. It's safe to assume that he was trying to evoke some kind of connection between socialism and Bulgar patriotism, because the purpose of this meeting was to found the first Bulgarian Socialist Party ... which, in fact, he did.
As it turned out, the socialist movement developed in ways that its founders never dreamed of in 1891. It's far from clear, therefore, whether Blagoev and his idealistic Marxist confrรจres would have approved of the later Bulgarian Communist Party and its policies. But of course, the latter insisted that their roots lay back in that great Meeting on The Mountain. Doing so gave them a ton of 'socialist lineage cred', which would've been difficult to come by otherwise. So once again, this remote peak in the Stara Planina took on a symbolic significance in (at least some versions of) Bulgaria's history.
Moving forward to the late 1970s: when the plans for a new Communist Party HQ were proposed, the Powers-That-Were decided to opt for symbolism over practicality. And so, for all the reasons above, they stuck their monument up on Blagoev's mountain, over 200kms from Sofija and accessible only via some rather steep, narrow and winding roads. Not a place to which you'd want to transport thousands of tons of building materials ... but there you go.
About 6,000 workers were involved in the construction of The Buzludzha Monument, which meant that they had to a) be in the area, and b) get up the mountain every day. So when bloggers and other web folk say that Buzludzha's completion was "a remarkable feat" (as they often do), they're really really not wrong. The monument was absolutely resplendent on the inside, with vast, intricate mosaics decorating almost every surface. Lenin, Marx and the other biggies put in appearances, as did all the classic Soviet mainstays like triumphant agricultural workers and so on. And it was all wrought on a particularly grand scale that hasn't quite been matched in any other place I know of.
(These mosaics, btw, represented the work of more than 20 artists over a period that ranges somewhere between three and seven years, depending on which account you read.)
And yes ... from the outside, it looked an awful lot like a flying saucer. A communist one, no less.
Tragically, Buzludzha had less than ten years to enjoy the spotlight. In certain corners of the internet, you can find wonderful photos of huge gatherings that were held up there back in the day. Parades of people wave flags along the mountain road, expressing (whether voluntarily or otherwise) their admiration for socialism as they ascend towards heaven / the mothership. The impression is almost of a kind of alternate reality, in which Marx met Spielberg on the set of The Sound of Music.
And then, in 1989, it all came to an abrupt end. One day after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Bulgarian Politburo ousted its long-standing leader Todor Zhivkov, who was one of those guys that journalists and historians like to call a 'hard-liner' (he'd strenuously resisted Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika reforms, for example). This effectively began a process that saw Bulgaria 'transitioning', like much of the FSU, from Communism to a deeply flawed and horribly corrupt form of democracy – the kind that earned the not-so-affectionate nickname "shitocracy" in Russia during the 1990s.
In this not-so-brave new world, there didn't seem to be much call for massive UFO-shaped edifices perching incongruously on mountaintops, and Buzludzha was simply left to fall apart. It hasn't quite done so yet, but it's well on the way. Successive governments have refused to preserve it as part of the nation's history and architectural heritage ... and internationally, a building like this one is more or less guaranteed to be overlooked by UNESCO, since there's still this bizarre perception in much of the world that Soviet-era architecture was a chronic aesthetic disease from which humanity is still recovering.
And so, it's up there rotting.
Meanwhile, Buzludzha has caught the eye of a completely unrelated group of people, namely the Urban Exploration or 'Urbex' movement. For those not familiar, Urbex is a worldwide underground phenomenon, mostly involving the exploration of abandoned or forbidden places in cities, or "unseen components" of functioning structures like skyscrapers, bridges and the like.
You can legally participate in this to a small degree by joining official tours like Sydney's Tank Stream tour, which takes very small groups under the city's most prominent streets, to see the man-made streams that were the backbone of the city's original water supply. But those who are into Urbex go a lot further, often risking arrest and/or injury to break into abandoned, derelict buildings.
On occasion, they'll go out of the city to a remote location that offers particularly good opportunities for illicit exploration. They'll even travel internationally, if the destination is sufficiently obscure and appealing.
This may all sound like a pointless extreme pastime for bored rich kids (and I guess in some cases it is), but Urban Exploration has its reflective, almost philosophical side as well. It's expressed quite eloquently here by the photographer and urban explorer Timothy Allen, who has been inside Buzludzha and has also photographed it aerially from an ultra-lite during a snow storm (just in case you thought you were pretty courageous and manly):
"These days, in my country at least, it’s very unfashionable to let a significant building die gracefully. Aside from the money-making implications, we tend to feel that we are somehow disrespecting our heritage by allowing them to decay, and so, often we attempt to stop the march of time by tidying them up and imprisoning them behind a red rope, preserving them in a most awkward state of disrepair for future generations to line up and look at from a viewing platform. The ironic thing is that abandoned buildings feel alive to me. They are involved in a beautiful natural process that the act of preservation will, by its nature, halt and kill.
Of course my opinion is an unfairly idealised and overly romantic one ... However, on the rare occasions that I get to visit a forgotten building as magnificent as this one, I can’t help day dreaming about some of the incredible monumental relics I know back home and quietly wishing that a few more of them had been left to grow old and perish naturally rather than being unceremoniously hooked up to the proverbial life support machine of modern tourism." **So that's the basic idea.
Anyhow, this Buzludzha thingie has been turning up ever more regularly on the wish lists of urban explorers, and people have literally come from all over the world to see it. (I recently read a breathless account of its beauty written by a blogger from Brazil.)
Getting in requires a bit of breaking and entering, since every year or so the Bulgarian government sends someone up the mountain to re-inforce bars across the front doors and seal up any other entrances that might have been created. But the Urbex folks aren't deterred by that. There's always a way in, if you want it badly enough. Almost every blog you read about Buzludzha offers a slightly different description of the unofficial entrance – probably because every time one is sealed up by the authorites, explorers and/or locals make another.
So you could say that Buzludzha has become a 'cult destination'.
ENTER THE NERDLY
I imagine that by now, you've probably formed a pretty good hypothesis as to how all this historical and subcultural palaver fits into my holiday plans. Let's see if I can validate your theory.
Basically, after leaving Istanbul I travelled up through the north-western corner of Turkey, and over the border to Bulgaria. There I spent a couple of pleasant days chilling out and playing on the beach in Ravda (Bulgarian Black Sea Coast).
As I vaguely mentioned before, Yuliya really, really, really wanted a seaside holiday this year. I thought a couple of days by the beach might be nice, but she was talking about three weeks. Splashing about in the shallows for that long would, quite frankly, kill me. I'm just not that much of a beach person. Plus, her preference for the beach holiday was Bulgaria ... so as soon as I heard that, my thoughts turned to communist space ships, and that's pretty much where they stayed.
We talked about this for some time, and eventually struck a deal: she'd have the seaside holiday she wanted, and I'd join her and Timur for a couple of days on Bulgaria's (relatively) golden sands; and in return, I'd get to go and do one of my silly pointless quests.
So that's basically what I did.
My two days in Ravda, messing about in the gentle waves and on the shoreline, were very pleasant and relaxing, and probably also good for my pasty-ass complexion. But the road did its usual beckoning thing, and so I re-stuffed my wheelie bag, hugged my family, and headed for a place widely known by the English translation of its Bulgarian name, 'Sunny Beach' (apparently somewhat infamous for its badly-behaved groups of young, male British tourists and its beach-walking prostitutes). There I would look for a bus to Stara Zagora, at the eastern edge of the Stara Planina range.
I've previously written about the warmth and friendliness of Bulgarians, and overall, that's a compliment I still stand by. However, for some reason it didn't quite hold true for me east of the Stara Planina, where I ran into quite a few cranky and monosyllabic locals.
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SO DON'T ASK! Sunny Beach, Bulgaria, 09.07.14 |
I looked around and couldn't see a platform 5 anywhere. I eventually found it, but only after about 15 minutes of searching the entire perimeter of the building.
Four hours later in Stara Zagora, I got similar but worse treatment from another Window Woman, as she put on her best "Oh for crap's sake, a foreigner. I really don't need this in my day!" routine. That's a reaction I'm accustomed to receiving in certain FSU countries that I won't call by name here, but I definitely didn't expect it in Bulgaria. It took me a second to recover myself and ask where the toilet was – a question which I know how to ask correctly in Bulgarian, but which she pretended not to understand.
From Stara Zagora, a marshrutka (crappy old minibus) would take me to the town of Kazanlak, in the foothills of the Stara Planina. There I would spend the night, before striking out tomorrow into Bulgaria's green and mountainous heartland.
The driver aimed a bit more of the same monosyllabic gruffness at me, and looked like he was about to either a) kill himself or b) just go home and get drunk, leaving us stranded at the bus station. But when the marshrutka got going, that all changed. He struck up an animated conversation with a middle-aged woman in the seat next to his, which continued the entire way and which had him looking away from the road about 50% of the time.
Oh, what fun it is to hurtle down a pot-holed highway with a driver who isn't paying attention. I never get tired of that.
*ahem*
We somehow made it to Kazanlak, and there the mood on the street changed back to its usual 'Bulgarian-ness'. My taxi driver was charming (and spoke Russian), the elderly ladies who ran my hotel were super-charming, and when I'd settled in and made it down the road to a restaurant, the staff there were charming too.
I can't even begin to guess why there should be such a difference. It's odd. Mountain air, perhaps?
Anyway ... time for a(nother) tangent.
The first time I visited Bulgaria, I met a really cool guy called Hristo in Sofija. Hristo is a talented designer, and also a native of Kazanlak. He doesn't live there anymore, though, because (as he told me within moments of us meeting) his lifelong dream was to emigrate to New Zealand. He's since realised that dream, and periodically we exchange messages and he tells me about how much he and his wife are enjoying their lives in Wellington.
I mention Hristo here because, during our several long chats in Sofija, he told me that his home town is famous for two things: producing over half of the world's rose oil, and manufacturing the best quality Kalashnikovs during Soviet times. Which is why (he told me), if you say the phrase "Guns'n'Roses" to a Bulgarian, they'll have a slightly different association to most other people: they'll think of Kazanlak.
As much as I enjoy that little piece of trivia, though, I was here in Hristo's birthplace neither for the guns, nor for the roses. I was here for the flying saucers – or rather, for one particular flying saucer, which lives about 20kms from the town at an elevation of 1,441 metres.
The problem was, I had no actual plan for getting there. I'd tried everything, from cajoling workmates into coming to Bulgaria with me and hiring a car together, to joining Couchsurfing and contacting anyone vaguely interesting who lived in the area, telling them of my plans and asking if they'd like to join.
It seemed that I just didn't know the right people – or that if I did, they were much too far away and/or much too committed to normal, sensible life pursuits like work, family and so on. And therefore, very understandably, they were not about to just throw all that to one side and go Communist saucer-hunting with me on a mountain top in the middle of frikkin' nowhere.
Boiling that down to its essentials, I'd basically arrived in Kazanlak with no means of actually getting to where I wanted to go ... which is why, right at the beginning of this rant, I mentioned how much I admire those documentary makers.
And with that, I think I'll end this extremely circuitous ramble, and leave the rest for tomorrow. Or, to put that another way:
TO BE CONTINUED HERE:
The Flying Saucer Chronicles Part 2
(* FSU = former Soviet Union.)
** I urge you to check out Timothy Allen's photography, which is almost unbearable beautiful. If his shots of Mongolia don't make you want to get on a plane immediately, you're a far more responsible person than I. You can see some here: https://www.facebook.com/timothy.allen?fref=ts
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