Submitted by WA Contents

Visiting Bulgaria’s Abandoned Communist Mecca

United Kingdom Architecture News - Sep 20, 2014 - 11:30   3446 views

Visiting Bulgaria’s Abandoned Communist Mecca

Photos by Jenny Marc

High atop a mountain in the very center of Bulgaria sits what was supposed to be the nation’s pride and glory: the House of the Bulgarian Communist Party. Bigger in size than the Pantheon in Rome, the Buzludzha monument—a futuristic oval structure with a tower, 230 feet tall, overlooking the stunning mountain landscape—was meant to be a communist mecca. Adorning the top of the tower was a huge red star made of ruby glass that, when lit up, was seen all the way from neighboring Greece and Romania.

Built in 1981, this was peak communism.

Visiting Bulgaria’s Abandoned Communist Mecca

But it all went downhill from there. As Bulgaria embarked on its difficult path toward democracy in 1989, Buzludzha was left to decay—and to polarize the post-communist society, dividing it along a love-it-or-hate-it line. Its crumbling skeleton now perches like a deserted flying saucer on top of the hill. Its red star—pillaged through the years by naïve looters who fell for the communist propaganda that it was made of ruby (it was actually plain crimson glass)—has been dark for a quarter of a century.....Continue Reading

> via Vice