Great Journey 🏍 Day 259
"Beam me up, Scotty"
We wrap up thickly (up on the pass it's a cosy 10 degrees with a strong wind) and are ready for Star Trek Wars.
But seriously now:
This socialist-architectural brutalism is not beautiful, but it is impressive.
The UFO, as everyone here calls the Buzludzha monument, was built in honour of the communist party. At the beginning of construction, the mountain peak (15,000 cubic metres) is removed with TNT to create the pretty thing.
At an altitude of about 1400 metres, visible from afar, a total of over 6,000 people worked on this flying saucer. Inaugurated in 1981, it was used by the Bulgarian Communist Party for only 8 years. In 1989, as is well known, there was no longer any reason for the one-party adoration and for this monument. So it stood - locked and unused - up there on the mountain for years.
Then, in the late nineties, new government leaders unlocked the door again and it was not long before looters began removing metal and other valuable materials. The most expensive items disappeared immediately - including the massive copper ceiling - and it is rumoured that government officials took them for themselves. Some visitors, believing the red stars in the tower were made of real rubies, shot them out with guns - only to be showered in broken synthetic ruby glass. (Source: buzludzha-monument.com)
Okay, then it rained and snowed in. And then what happens to buildings is clear.
So here we are 30 years after it first rained in, we're not allowed in and we see a ruin, a huge and clunky one, but just a ruin!
There will be no more "Beam me up, Scotty" today. We sit on Malou and she drives us over the beautiful Shipkapass back to Motocamp.
Addendum: my husband hereby distances himself in no uncertain terms from the phrase "Star Trek Wars" 🤷🏻♀️
// I was forced to write this now //
#Buzludzha #shipka #Ufo #Brutalism #ExCommunism
