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The Land Cruiser thumped up the trail. I was riding shotgun, which meant I had a seat belt. Lotte made do by bracing against the top of the back seat with one hand and the roof with the other while trying not to land on the exposed metal wheel arch after each bump. Seven people in the truck would have been chaos but today it was just us and Andy, our rad driver. We were in Bulgaria heading towards the abandoned communist monument known as Buzludzha.
The truck skidded as we rammed through the snow, higher up the mountain. Andy struggled with understeer as he turned the truck in, and then oversteer as we hit the apex of each curve on the ice. A few days earlier we had tried to hire a car in Bucharest to come here but the road today had shown that that would not have been a very good idea.
Slowly the slush gave way to snow and soon everything was covered with a thick layer of frost. Every twig and branch and even the snow itself had blades of frost pointing in the direction of the wind. It looked like Narnia.
After about half an hour the monument appeared in the distance. It looked like the pictures: a strange, UFO shaped building built on the very top of a mountain. Next to it, a giant tower displaying the largest communist star in the world. At night the star used to be illuminated and was visible from surrounding countries. Buzludzha was opened in 1981 to commemorate the beginning of the Bulgarian socialist movement. In 1989 the communist regime in Bulgaria collapsed and the building was ransacked and then abandoned.
As we got closer we realised the pictures didn’t do it justice. These pictures don’t, either; the building is huge. Heading towards it, Andy piloted the truck straight up a flight of stairs and parked it under the main entrance. The building loomed over us. No one else was around as we stepped out. We took some obligatory tourist pictures, changed film (only me), and put on all the clothes we owned. The main entrance to the monument is always securely sealed but around the side a small hole about chest level had been forced open. These small access holes are regularly welded closed by the authorities but they are always reopened. Today it was open.
We pushed our bags up ahead of us, twisted around backwards and somehow pulled ourselves up and in. The wind howled.
The floor inside was rubble mixed with ice. The ceiling was tatters of red velvet. We went up the frozen marble stairs and entered the main auditorium. The room resembled a circular theatre without the seats, the walls lined with rotting murals in the socialist realist style. Marx, Engels and Lenin looked down from one wall. On the opposite wall, their Bulgarian comrades: Zhivkov, Blagoev and Dimitrov. The face of Zhivkov had been scratched off.
We headed to the viewing gallery outside. More murals on the inside wall, and on the outside, enormous, empty windows gave a 360º view of the surrounding countryside. On the hillside opposite stood brand new wind turbines. We walked through more scattered bricks and rubble and over thick ice that would have been ankle deep water were it not so cold. The wind continued to howl and the remaining corrugated iron panels of the roof flapped around loosely.
Back inside we made our way to the pitch black passage that led to the tower. Putting on headlamps we looked around. On one side was the elevator shaft still filled with the remains of the old elevator: steel cables, pulleys, doors, a broken motor. Straight ahead was the steep access staircase. We decided on the stairs.
The steel railings and steps were covered with a thick layer of ice. Markings spray painted on the wall by previous visitors indicated how many flights were remaining. The numbers went down from 30.
We began to climb.
We locked our heel onto the edge of each step and leaned back to apply pressure, to try to maximise the grip on the ice. The €5 gloves we had bought at a petrol station on the way turned out to be essential. Echoes of our footsteps bounced around in the darkness. Slowly the numbers got smaller.
As we climbed higher the ice thinned and eventually we reached the inside of the star. When the building was built it had been claimed that the star was made of ruby. After the regime collapsed, some enterprising citizens had decided to collect their share and shot at the star from below. The bullet holes are still visible. We picked up some of the fragments. It wasn’t ruby.
After the star, the stairs gave way to vertical ladders and two stories later we reached the hatch that led out to the top of the tower. The sun was getting lower and vivid colours had spread out across the sky. On the northern side, the snow capped Balkan Mountains could be seen. We looked down at the monument below. In front of the building another car had arrived, some sort of SUV. A family got out, walked around for a bit and then returned to their car. Buzludzha is one of the most impressive buildings in Europe. They looked at it for two minutes.
The family set off again and became instantly bogged in the snow. We looked down at them and ate muesli bars.
After a while Andy felt he should go and help. We took our time, slowly following after. When we met him again at the bottom he told us the car wasn’t an SUV but another Land Cruiser.
In the basement we found the old electrical heating and ventilation system. Andy enthused that all this communist stuff still worked. He demonstrated by slowly rotating the spindle of a large fan. I asked him if his definition of “works” might be a little loose.
Later we came across some decaying flowers lying in a corner. Apparently it was a kind of memorial for someone who had been murdered in here. I asked who had murdered them. “Murderers”, was the answer. All righty then.
The sun was setting as we climbed out. We took some more tourist photos in the golden light, always compromising between photographic opportunities and frozen hands. Then we got into the truck and headed back, back down the stairs and back down the icy four wheel drive track, only once nearly oversteering over the side.
In its heyday, Buzludzha had been a magnificent symbol of communist achievement. Today it is no less magnificent, though for different reasons. A large part of its allure now comes from its dereliction; the way it’s literally falling apart even as you gaze up at it. Tragically, this means it won’t be here for much longer.
© 2026 Jace K
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