DISSERTATION
Abstract
The journey of writing this text began when I was in a foreign country; I met a foreigner, who had visited Bulgaria and showed me what impressed him the most. It was something I had never seen before. The monument of Buzludzha was, as commonly said in Bulgarian, a modern palace in the middle of nowhere. Its function was to represent the power of the Communist Party, the construction of a decade, a site truly planned to last. Its life, however, did not even reach manhood as it was desolated only ten years after it opened its doors in 1981.
For a while I was frustrated for being unfamiliar with one of the greatest architectural achievements realized in my own country, despite considering myself an ambitious aspiring architect. When my emotions settled down, room for curiosity opened up. Why did I not know about Buzludzha? Why did I know so little about this political episode of the development of my country? Trying to find out more about the monument, I hit many dead ends.
Most of the documents on this piece of architecture were destroyed, which made it even more exciting for me. At a certain point I managed to find the phone number of the architect, the 92-year-old at the time, Georgi Stoilov. The phone call I had with him inspired me further and set me on the path to revealing interesting facts about this structure.
Buzludzha is a symbol of power, anger, shame, neglect, but also grace, emotion, and sublimity. It is provocative because it represented an ideology controversial to that of modern Bulgaria. Different generations look at Communism differently – some were born and spent most of their lives in its heyday, some experienced the drastic shift to Democracy, and the youngest, born after it, know little to nothing about it.
The following text presents a mix of theories, observations, facts, interpretations, speculations, illustrations and conclusions on the political and social aspects throughout the whole existence of the monument. Since I am an aspiring architect, not a writer or a philosopher, I have allowed myself to be messy and emotional at points. The text is ordered to be perceived rather as an experience, and perhaps would be easier perceived by architects and artists.
