Mo(nu)ments in soz baroque exploring an inheritance of socialist memory

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MO(NU)MENTS IN SOZ-BAROQUE
Exploring an Inheritance of Socialist Memory

by

Anna S. Antonova






Cassandra Cleghorn, Adviser







A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in English





WILLIAMS COLLEGE
Williamstown, Massachusetts



Friday, May 18, 2012

Acknowledgments

My gratitude to all the wonderful people in my life could comprise its own thesis. But I will try
to accomplish this most challenging task for an English Major and keep it short.

To my adviser, Professor Cassandra Cleghorn. When we were first discussing my thesis plans, I
promised her I would not be one of those thesis students whose hand she must hold through the
process. A year later, I am anxious to thank her for all the hand-holding she has done. Without all of her
support, helpful advice, and brilliant editing, I never would have made it through.

To the high school teachers who shared with me their memories of Socialism last summer. Their
stories were just one other way in which they have influenced my reason and soul for the better.
Without their teachings, I would not have been either the student or the person that I am. Even now,
long after my graduation, I am grateful to call myself their pupil.

There are so so many professors at Williams to whom I am thankful. Professor Jim Carlton
helped me figure out my future in the space of a single coffee date. Professor Stephen Tifft taught me
everything I know about writing academic papers. Professor Christopher Pye introduced me to my
adviser and provided indispensable help and advice throughout the process, especially for the first
chapter. And Professor Robert Bell, whose guidance, generosity, and friendship during these four years
have embodied for me the very best of Williams spirit. I could never fully express how deeply indebted
I am to all my mentors at Williams. They have given me the courage to grow and face my
imperfections and teach myself to be better.

To my friends, here and back home. Their endless teasing on each side of the Atlantic is my
life's bane and blessing. Without their sense of humor, I would have long lost my sanity. (To those of
you here – I hope you believe I know English now. And to those of you back home – I wrote this thesis
by seating on my keyboard.)

To David, because he was there to make my senior year special in an unexpected way.

To Barbara and Ted, my American family, whose endless kindness to me can never be repaid
and my gratitude to whom can never be all told. And as if it weren't enough that they opened their
hearts and their home to me as to a daughter, it was Barbara who first suggested to me that I write
down my parents' memories of Socialism. I hope she enjoys reading them.

And at last to my family, who are first in my heart. Everyone thanks their family when they
write a thesis, but my family is my thesis: they are the inspiration, the reason, the content, my source of
information and support. To mama and tate and Kris. To baba Vera and baba Ana. To dyado Hristo and
dyado Dancho, both of whom I miss. Thank you for your love, for home, for the freedom to find for
myself who I want to be. If all I ever accomplish is to make you proud, I will know I have done well.



Table of Contents


A Note on the Terminology

Chronology

Forget Your Past

The City Immured

In Step with the Times

A Hammer Throw, a Sickle Toss, and a Long-
Distance Run to the West

From Ages For Ages
i.

ii.

1

8

35


40

66

Works Cited

68
i



A Note on the Terminology

Throughout my thesis, I have used the term “Socialism” because it provides a more accurate
description of the 1944-1989 period in Bulgarian history than the (arguably) more popular term
“Communism.”
In Marxist theory, “Communism” refers to a stateless, moneyless, classless society, where all

resources and all means of acquiring them are shared equally among the people. Soviet vision – or at
least Soviet rhetoric – aspired to “build” Communism. This would be accomplished gradually by
constructing Socialism first: that is, a classless and egalitarian society, but one still dependent on
money and still controlled by the state. Once achieved, the Socialist state would then continue working
toward building Communism.
Of course, Communism was never properly “built.” Accordingly, Bulgarian academics today
generally refer to the 1944-1989 political regime as “Socialism.” I have chosen to do the same.

ii
Chronology

1939-1945 – World War II. Bulgaria maintains neutrality until 1941, when German troupes reach the
Bulgarian borders and demand passage to Greece.

28
th
of August 1943 – King Boris III, known for his refusal to extradite Bulgaria's Jewish population or
declare war on the Soviet Union on Hitler's orders, dies in Sofia. Speculations of murder by poison
remain unconfirmed. A Regency Council is established on behalf of his six-year-old heir, Simeon II.

13
th
of December 1943 – Axis forces Bulgaria to declare token war on the United States and the United
Kingdom. This results in a series of bombings on Sofia during the winter and spring of 1943-1944.

10
th
of January 1944 – One of many bomb raids on Sofia. My great-grandfather dies, killed when his
house on Kaloyan Street is hit by a bomb.

9
th
of September 1944 – Red Army occupies Bulgaria; Socialist party coup d'état.

6
th
of October 1944 – “People's Court of Justice” established. Over the next half year, this institution
will issue death orders for thousands of former politicians, intellectuals, and activists. Prince Kyril,
brother to King Boris III and regent to King Simeon II, is among the many victims.

1946 – A country-wide referendum determines that 95% of the population is opposed to a monarchy.
King Simeon II flees the country with his mother and sister. Bulgaria is declared a “People's Republic.”

4
th
of December 1947 – Acceptance of the “Dimitrovska” Constitution, which puts an official end to
the Bulgarian monarchy and exchanges the division of power principle for the unity of state principle.
Private ownership abolished and all property is given over to the state.

1944-1949 – Rule of Georgi Dimitrov.

1950-1954 – Rule of Valko Chervenkov.

1954-1989 – Rule of Todor Zhivkov.

1989 – A series of revolutions sweep across Eastern Europe.

9
th
of November 1989 – The Berlin Wall falls.

10
th
of November 1989 – Todor Zhivkov forced to resign and removed from power.

11
th
of December 1989 – Fall demonstrations force Zhivkov's replacement, Petar Mladenov, to
announce that the Communist Party is abandoning power. He is later revealed to have said, “The tanks
had better come” („По-добре танковете да дойдат“). Subsequently, Mladenov retires from politics.

January 15, 1990 – Communist Party's “leading role” formally denounced by National Assembly.

June 1990 – first free elections in Bulgaria since 1931.
Forget Your Past
I was born in November 1989, the night before the Berlin Wall fell, two nights before the event
that signaled the end of Bulgarian Socialism. On November 10
th
, President Todor Zhivkov, whose iron
fist had gripped the country for thirty-five years, announced his formal resignation. The announcement
was made on Zhivkov's behalf by his former subordinates who had recognized the need for drastic
changes as a wave of revolutions swept across the Eastern Bloc that year. On November 10
th
, as various
speakers in the Parliament thanked him for his resignation and wished him joy in his “well-deserved
rest,” Zhivkov's face registered the confusion that an entire generation of Bulgarians must have felt. He
had been omnipotent for the duration of three and a half decades – my parents' entire conscious lives.
Mama was still in the hospital when she heard the news. She has told me the story so many
times I can relate it almost as if I was there myself – which, of course, I was, perhaps cradled in her
arms, although language and memory were still beyond me at this point. When the nurse came in and

said, “Todor Zhivkov fell!” („Тодор Живков падна!“), mama thought to herself, Keep silent. It's only a
trap.
Growing up, I have always found this story funny. And I mean this in both senses. I was born
just in time to have witnessed the last two months of Soviet Bulgaria, just in time to have lived through
what is called Lukanov's Winter – a time when even bread, milk, and simple medicine were hard to
come by. Mama often also tells the story of tate lining up for milk every morning at five o'clock. “I
took pity on him one day,” she says, “and brought you to the queue later in the morning. I thought that
people would let me skip in line when they saw it was for my baby, but instead they attacked me: 'Did
you steal this baby to cheat us?' But how was I to have known what would happen when you were
conceived?” mama asks me.
By the time I was old enough to hear and understand these stories, they were hard to conceive.
1
It was odd to think of how directly they had concerned me at the time, and of how alien they would
sound, to me and my parents both, only a few years later.
“Good things are easy to get used to,” mama says. By the mid-90s, my parents' own memories
of Socialism had already come to seem distant and alien. “It gets difficult to return to such things,”
mama goes on. “They come back slowly, with effort.” For me as well, recording my parents'
recollections is hindered, polluted by the problem of context. I am the child of an era drastically
different from that of my parents; but at the same time, I am the child of my parents.
Mama's fear to even believe in the fall of Communism seems incomprehensible to me. But to
her, it felt natural: she had gone her entire life without daring to believe. Her fear had marked her
measurably, shaping all the ways she had of thinking and feeling. A trimester before my birth, on her
way back from a conference in Munich, mama had had the sudden, painful urge to stay. “I sat there at
the airport after checking my bags in,” she recalls, “thinking, Never mind the bags. I'll be fine without
them.” She did not, she did not, she did not want to board her flight. She cried out of her desire to
linger.
In Western Germany. In English, the word is defection. In Bulgaria, the term for those who
defected was nevazvrashtenzi („невъзвръщенци“):“non-returners.” Those who do not, cannot, ever
return. If such people were to return, they would face the death penalty, by which I mean they would
“go missing” and never be seen – or, often, heard of – again.

Back home, the families the nevazvrashtenzi had left behind would suffer. “Your father would
have lost his job as soon as it was known I had defected,” mama told me. “And he would never have
been able to find another job. And what would have become of your brother?”
Hearing this story as I grew up, there was always the dramatic irony of my privileged
perspective, as someone who might well have reaped the benefits of dual citizenship. Had only mama
known! She had this instinct, there, with me in her belly, only a few short months before my birth,
2
before the end of Socialism! What if she had followed this magical intuition? To me, it seemed all too
simple, funny in both senses. But I cannot possibly feel what mama felt: her absolute incapability to
believe. Sitting there at the Munich airport, she could not believe in change to come. Three months
later, in the hospital, she could not believe in change even as it occurred.
Now, thinking back on mama's unbelievable stories, I wonder about my ability to comprehend
my parents' memories in general. Can I relate to them at all? Can I truly believe in them? Despite the
context of my late birth, which makes me insensitive to what my parents had gone through and
structurally incapable of grasping their era; despite how impossible it is for me to appreciate the stakes
of their experiences, I am oddly and instinctively drawn towards their memories of Socialism. I feel a
weird nostalgia for their strange world and all the manifestations that lurk in their memories: the alien,
the absurd, the twisted.
Then again, what is nostalgia? Etymologically, the word combines the ancient Greek words for
“homecoming” (νόστος or nóstos) and “pain, ache” (ἄλγος or álgos)
1
. Its original meaning is therefore
much more complex than the saccharine derivative we refer to in modern Western society. There is
nothing sweet about the primary sense or about the feeling itself. The word expresses a sort of
suspension – a lacking, an emptiness. Something was once familiar, not necessarily good or bad, but it
was one's own. And now it is no longer the same, or no longer there – hence the ache.
For the generation that raised me, Socialism can feel nostalgic regardless of whether they were
happy with the regime. One of my history teachers once told me there was one thing she particularly
missed from Socialism: her youth. That sense of irretrievable loss was only amplified by the political
change. Nothing is the same, nothing can be the same, nothing should be the same.

But is the desire to return a necessary predicament for nostalgia? And do you actually have to
have witnessed an era in order to feel nostalgic for it? After all, my own nostalgia for Socialism is an
1 Online English Dictionary, “Nostalgia.” <www.oed.com>. Retrieved April 5, 2012.
3
odd, belated concept. My right to the memories of Socialism is only indirect, acquired through mama
and tate as part of my cultural, intellectual, and emotional heritage. And yet, how can I possibly
approach my inheritance of Socialism without feeling nostalgia for the world my parents grew up in, a
world I will never know?
Surely the emotional stakes of remembering are just as important to remember as the historical
facts. Twenty-two years after the Change, the number of academic works and memoirs discussing the
regime is rapidly growing in Bulgaria. But the more I read about my parents' era in books, the more I
feel as if I am actively sterilizing the world they grew up in. Actually, this sterilization seems
purposeful for most of my generation. As if the reality of Socialism is too different from whatever
reality we would like to believe in, our instincts tend to the historical instead of the personal. We
catalog our parents' past instead of remembering it as belatedly or indirectly our own.
When we look at the physical remnants of Socialism, at best we regard them as museum
installations. At worst, and much too often, we let them disintegrate into oblivion. Traveling around
Bulgaria today, you come across dozens of neglected monuments from the Soviet era. They embody the
memories of Socialism: today, no one will bear the responsibility of maintaining them.
In 2009, photographer Nikola Mihov documented fourteen such monuments for his online blog
“Forget Your Past,” listing each monument's purpose and exposing its current deterioration.
2
Mihov's
introduction identifies the symbolism of the monuments' fate: “ once a symbol of pride, today most
are neglected and ransacked. Regardless of whether they were built to commemorate the Soviet Army
or the struggle against Ottoman rule, they all share one and the same fate: to be a silent symbol of the
forgotten past.”
3
All too apt, a modern-day graffiti above the entrance of the Bulgarian Communist
Party's House-Monument – built on top of mount Buzludzha in the Balkan mountain – reads, “Forget

2 Nikola Mihov, “Forget Your Past” (2009). Nikola Mihov Official Website.
< Retrieved July 17, 2011.
3 Ibid.
4
Your Past.” On both sides of the doors, the original writing – verses of inspirational Socialist poetry –
is falling apart. The even font of the English graffiti makes a mockery of the shabby Bulgarian lines,
letters of which are crooked or lost.
My own relation to these crumbing monuments goes far back. Because of the coincidence that
my birth precedes the Berlin Wall's destruction by mere hours, I instinctively feel as if I could dig my
emotional heritage from underneath the rubbles of Socialist architecture.
There is a monument in the heart of Sofia, where I was born, that incarnates all those aspects of
Socialist memory. Enormous and elaborate, it was built in 1981 to celebrate Bulgaria's 1300-year
anniversary. At one end of the National Palace of Culture's wide garden, it commands the old houses
and boulevards around it. But it is a motley mess, a physical expression of the strangeness I sense in
my parents' tales of Socialism. The purpose of the monument is indistinguishable from its appearance.
The few dispersed statues are unrecognizable. And its shape is indescribable except by its nickname,
petoagalniyat shestohuynick („петоъгълният шестохуйник“), or as it is poorly translated: “The
Fiveangled Sixdickhead.” The precise numbers vary with every reference.
Since my birth and democracy, the monument has been falling apart. I have vague memories of
what it looked like before it was fenced off: stairs led down to its base from two sides, toward a space
intended for exhibits. A fence now protects passers by from falling pieces, as well as from the painful
exposure to its overall appearance. The upper part of the Sixangled Threedickhead still stands out to
shame the landscape, as phallic as its nickname. As does the memory it represents, the monument
lingers on, its fate suspended by society's indecision: still falling apart and neglected, still strange,
forever unavoidable.
I find it beautiful. Aesthetically, its appearance is hideous no matter how you look at it – and
believe me, there are many points of view with the Fourangled Sevendickhead. But I am captivated by
its representation of what life used to be for people who came of age before I was born. The Fiveangled
5
Fourdickhead is a tangible recollection. It circumvents my belatedness, because it is still there. Its

twisted form is a visual representative of my parents' odd memories: one I can sketch and wonder at;
one I can measure.
Looking at the monument, I feel a nostalgia for my un-experience of Socialism. I feel a desire
to understand the complexity of an inheritance that is impossibly, incomprehensibly, and
inappropriately mine. Who is to bear the responsibility of my parents' memories of Socialism if not I?
6
7
The City Immured
Recently tate and I got to talking about Socialist architecture and metaphor.
My dad is a taciturn man, sharp and composed and observant. Above all else in the world, I
believe, he appreciates beauty. When traveling, he prefers to walk around and absorb the atmosphere of
the place, taking in the city or mountain view. At home in our apartment, he smokes on the terrace
overlooking the park, and ever since I was old enough to stand, he has called me outside to show me
something beautiful: the moon red-gold behind a cloud, the sky pink or crimson with the sunset, the
violet calm of a morning. When we travel to the seaside every summer, all he cares for is the view of
the water from the balcony of our room. He can sit there for hours, watching the waves.
Soviet architecture irritates his aesthetic taste. “The panelki really are the best example,” he said
to me. “It suited those who thought up the system back then: housing as regular, gray, boring, and
obedient as the people inside.” The word he used for “obedient” is „послушни“ (poslushni), and is
usually applied to good children who listen to their parents. In the context of panelki dwellers, tate
means it differently: poslushni comes to suggest docility.
I should explain. Panelki („панелки“) are the signature apartment buildings of the former
Soviet Union, panelki being a slang variation of the diminutive form of the plural for “panel” in
Bulgarian. Individual panelki share the same features and the same appearance. They are
predominantly gray. They are pronouncedly rectangular – either much taller than they are long, or
much longer than they are wide. In either case, there are multiple vhods („входове“), or entries: vertical
hallways that share the same entrance, staircase, smelly old elevator, and set of problems. These
problems often include poor heat insulation: if you pressed your hand against an old panelka wall, you
would feel the drift of cold air coming through. As a consequence, nowadays people pay for the
installment of additional external insulation – a service companies have increasingly offered since the

8
rise of Capitalism in Bulgaria after 1989. Going through panelki neighborhoods, you can observe the
patchwork of new heat insulation spliced onto the outside walls. The facades are like quilts – against
the gray background, squares of green, or pink, or blue, or beige, or yellow, or white. There is usually a
different insulation color for each apartment, which lends to both the apartments in question, and to the
buildings on the whole, a surprising amount of individuality.
It's not that people consciously tried to individualize their space through their insulation, at least
not in the literal sense. It's just that is difficult to coordinate the ordering and delivery of your insulation
with your fellow vhod-mates so that the facade won't look patched together. No one gives money
readily for a public purpose anymore. That was Socialism. If we wanted Socialism, we would keep our
panelki the way they were, would we not? And I will insulate my own apartment's wall when and if I
get to it, thank you very much. The lost model of vhod comradeship, questionably effective even during
Socialism, is slipping away – just as the gray uniformity my father despises is disappearing under
patches of rainbow colors. Both are inapplicable to the democratic and capitalistic society that post-
Socialist Bulgaria strives to be now.
And, one longs to say, so are the panelki. They are notoriously cheaply built and badly
constructed. They quickly outlive their value, as the apartments in them must be constantly renovated.
Moreover, their bad quality is nothing compared to their figurative inconsistency with modern aesthetic
and ideological tastes. But for all of that, ignoring the significance of the panelki – whether in a
physical or in a metaphorical sense – is altogether impossible. Distant cousins of theirs unavoidably
exist in cities all over the world. And for better or worse, the panelki's construction transformed Sofia
entirely, shaping it into the city I grew up in – the city that in turn shaped me.
Architecture has an uncanny way of projecting itself into the mind. The more one thinks of
physical structures, the more internalized they become. Bachelard phrases this phenomenon elegantly
9
in his Poetics of Space: referring to house images, he writes, “they are in us as much as we are in
them”
4
. For Bachelard, memory and therefore human consciousness are inseparable from space: “At
times, we think we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a sequence of fixations in the spaces

of the being's stability.”
5
Our knowledge of ourselves in the past, that is, is constructed through our
recollections of the places we have inhabited – in fact, he claims it impossible to appreciate the passage
of time in memory without the remembered images of space.
Perhaps it is because of this that instinct refuses to write off the panelki as useless architectural
dinosaurs. I can sense their silhouettes mirrored in my thoughts. When I think of the panelki, for
instance, the ideology their commissioners stood for springs up uninvited. My father's immediate
recognition of their metaphorical significance is one example; that of Georgi Danailov, a contemporary
Bulgarian author, is another. “The panel man is damaged,” Danailov writes. “Perhaps irreparably. He
got accustomed to living and dying in a concrete dormitory, but nothing good can be expected from
such custom. The malignant consequences are yet to show, and they will affect unsuspecting
generations.”
6

If the panelki are as fatal a hereditary illness as Danailov describes them, this is bad news for
Bulgaria's measly population of 7.4 million, roughly 36% percent of whom (2.7 million)
7
live in
panelki. But I think Danailov's sense of how strong their influence is proves a more valuable deduction
than his prediction of their lethality. The panel man is certainly marked by the nature of his dwelling,
but that mark is not as simple as damage or blessing. As Bachelard points out, memory folds all the
aspects of one's house, positive or negative, into the general image of home: “In the past, the attic may
have seemed too small, it may have seemed cold in winter and hot in summer. Now, however, in
4 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, tr. Maria Jolas. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. xxxiii.
5 Ibid., p. 8.
6 Georgi Danailov, Kashta Otvad Sveta. (Sofia: Abagar, 2003), p. 24.
7 Milen Enchev, “Saniraneto na panelkite moje da spesti energia,” Dnevnik. February 22, 2011.
< Retrieved
November 11, 2012.

10
memory recaptured through daydreams, it is hard to say through what syncretism the attic is at once
small and large, warm and cool, always comforting.”
8
The panelki are a strange variation of Bachelard's
homely attic. They will never be described as someone's dream home, but they are the homes that come
up in dreams. I grew up in a panelen apartment myself.
9
My recollection of childhood is almost entirely
dependent on the structure of panelki: skipping steps on my way down to play, unveiling the mysteries
of other apartments in the building, communicating with the neighboring kids by shouting up and down
the balconies. And yet, I cannot disassociate the sentimentality pertinent to home from the knowledge
of panelki problems. In memory, I find it difficult to ascribe positive or negative value to either. Our
bathroom's leaking roof – water seeped through the plaster every time the upstairs neighbors took a
bath – is just as memorable as my long showers performing alchemistry with soaps, pomades, and
shampoos by our bathtub. The vhod bickering seems now, in retrospect, as exciting as were the
playground dates with the vhod-mates' kids. I am forever marked as a panelka child, but if I am
damaged by it, then that damage only claims me all the more strongly for the place I call home.
In Italo Calvion's Invisible Cities, the eternal traveler Marco Polo finds himself again and again
in the image of Venice.
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But it is no ordinary Venice. It is his Venice, his only home, the one city he
seeks: a place that simultaneously eludes and taunts him through endless mirages of cities, all different,
all representative of the same. There is a similar concept in Roger Zelazny's fantasy series The
Chronicles of Amber, where the titular land of Amber is not only a magical kingdom, but also the sole
core of the universe, the only place that is real.
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It casts out infinite reflections of itself – shadow
worlds, which contain only as much of their true source as the oscillations of its presence in the world
8 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 10.

9 My brother recently reminded me that our apartment building technically counts as different than the traditional
panelka. It was constructed with somewhat sturdier materials than panels. However, the difference is slight: insignificant
enough, in fact, that I can forget about it. Our apartment building looks the same, has the same structure, and the same
problems. In my mind, it is a true panelka.
10 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (Le citta invisibili). (Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1972.)
11 Roger Zelazny, Chronicles of Amber. (Galaxy Science Fiction, 1970.)
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disperse. Zelazny's characters ceaselessly fight their way across the shadows to obtain Amber, where
they are born, where their hearts lie. Both Invisible Cities and The Chronicles of Amber present one's
home as a prism imprinted in the soul. You take its image wherever you go, whatever you do, and only
ever walk through shadows of it elsewhere.
Bulgarian folklore has a legend that perfectly expresses this inherent connection between
physical space and the way our hearts inhabit it. The motif is called immuring shadows. Its essence, a
haunting concept, is always the same. To build a socially significant construction of stones – a water
fountain, a bridge, a church – the craftsman must make a special kind of sacrifice. He must build into
his masonry the shadow of a human being, usually a young woman, so as to lend the building strength
and relent the ill-disposed forces. In some songs, the sacrificed woman (often the mason's wife or
beloved) is literally immured within the building, buried alive beneath the stones. But even when it is
only her shadow built into the walls, her life is thereafter taken away from her: she “languishes” and
“pines away,” as the great Bulgarian poet Petko Slaveykov wrote,
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and her spirit's strength gradually
spills into the stones of the construction until she dies.
It's an ancient, pagan concept, of course. Perhaps it partly served to explain away sicknesses my
ancestors could not understand or cure. Yet I think the legend deeply intuits to the way in which
buildings become more than simple constructions, the instinct of man to lend his heart to a place and
call it home. In the songs and tales where the immuring motif appears, the woman's spirit always
remains with the building, occasionally seen there as a ghost or a talasam („таласъм“, a goblin-like
creature in Bulgarian folklore). Just so, I think, parts of ourselves are left behind at all the places we
have inhabited. Bachelard writes about memory contained within space. The motif of immuring gets at

how souls are contained within particular places.
In Sofia, memories and old souls alike are laid out for you to see. It is an ancient city,
12 Petko R. Slaveykov, “Izvorat na belonogata,“ 1873.
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established at the skirts of Vitosha mountain thousands of years ago, and it is still inhabited by the
traces of all civilizations that have staked their claims on it. Shadows are embedded in the city's vertical
construction like the layered pastry sheets of banitsa. You can look on Socialist architecture as the
uppermost sheet, only topped by the frosting of twenty-first century buildings, and the city's immured
souls can be mapped vertically, as a topography: the y-axis on an xy-graph.
History is piled upon the Roman ruins still underground. The earliest heritage – prehistoric
settlements as early as 5000 BC and the Thracian tribes that came after – is not prominent
architecturally; it was too far removed, and the buildings were not permanent enough, to leave a visible
urban mark. But to see the (still quite ancient) Roman period, all you have to do is peer into the right
basement. There is a hotel in the center (“Arena di Serdica”), for instance, that incorporates an entire
Roman arena into its lobby. As you walk by, you can look through the first floor window and past the
balconies of lower levels, down into the arena's open excavations on the lowest floor, carefully lighted
at key corners to underline its mystique. You can see the seats around what used to be the stage. You
can try to count the individual layers of Roman stone. You can enjoy it all from where you are, high up
on the street sidewalk, as it basks down there in the soft yellow glow of hotel sterility.
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The Roman ruins are everywhere in the center. Sometimes, they are already integrated into the
urban structure, as in the underpass in front of the Party House. Descending down its stairs is like
entering a modern art gallery of history. The old Roman walls are framed only loosely by the polished
stone sides of the underpass. They spill out into the pedestrian space and offer themselves for whatever
use you might make of them: touching, climbing, resting, observing. In one place, a Roman arch
constitutes the entrance of a store. The ancient architecture, hence, has been reordered into the modern
context both in a practical sense and as a gallery object – just as, interestingly, the Soviet-built
underpass is reordered into our post-Socialist context. New businesses populate the old stores. New
signs bracket the length of the underpass on each side. But just as in the case of the Roman
architecture, the Soviet atmosphere spills out of its frame and into your attention.

At other times, the Roman architecture comes up unexpectedly. This is what happened to the
arena that was discovered by accident during the excavation of the base of the hotel. Such accidents are
not at all uncommon. When I was a little girl, mama once showed me a Roman building that had been
uncovered beneath a major crossroad en route to her work. Where the two boulevards crossed, a wide
square ditch had been dug out. The tramway rails going both ways had been cut, the large canalization
and communication pipes gaped open as in a game of Super Mario. And in that hole, like a Blossom
Tea Flower in a mug, rested a round Roman construction. City workers had been digging for
canalization and had stumbled upon one of the ancient city wall towers, wonderfully preserved and
entirely troublesome. Embarrassed, all they could do in the end was secure the thing with some metal
beams and dig it right back underground. It was a major crossroad in central Sofia: there was simply
nowhere else for all the traffic to go. So they reburied the past.
The vigilant Bulgar tribe got to Sofia in 809 AD and occupied the city ever since, except for the
two negligible interruptions by century-long foreign rules. In Bulgarian narrative tradition, these are
referred to as „иго“, igo (“yoke”) or „робство“, robstvo (“slavery”). Technically, the term should be
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“rule”: one Byzantine rule (1018-1185) and one Ottoman rule (1393-1878). Whether we choose to
ignore them or not, though, both periods left their architectural marks upon Sofia – and sometimes,
especially in the case of religious buildings, these marks were layered on top of each other. Just as with
the famous example of Hagia Sofia in Istanbul, many Sofian churches – some of them left over from
the Byzantine period – were transformed into mosques during the Ottoman period. Today, only one
mosque remains in town, not far from the crossroad with the Roman tower, and all of the rest have been
turned back into churches.
The metamorphoses of religious buildings can also be described mathematically, actually, since
it is only a matter of adding or subtracting variables. Remove an altar from an Orthodox Christian
church, add minarets and appendixes, and you have yourself a mosque. Reverse the process, and there,
you have your Orthodox church back. „Свети Седмочисленици“ (Sveti Sedmochislenitzi) was built as
a mosque in 1582, but an addition of an altar and an entryway in 1897 transformed it into the brick-
and-stone-walled, graceful church huddled between the willows of its garden today.
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The site of the

church retains sanctity from ages long past. There was a Roman church there as early as the 5
th
century,
and even before that, an ancient Greek temple to Asclepius. Perhaps because I was baptized there, I am
especially sensitive to the religious shadows built into this church, immured, like the plaster in between
the bricks. The way sun beams creep into the dimmed, dignified interior of the church never lets me
forget the heavy, ancient sacredness. This understanding, too, is vertical – but not in the physical sense.
It is almost as if, standing under the church's central dome, I can feel the layers of religious history
mapped within my own experience of the space. As if the immured shadows of martyrs are only
keeping company to the piece of my own soul surrendered to this church the day I was baptized.
If you look carefully enough, I think you can see these spiritual vertical layers also expressed in
the physical y-axis. Spirituality becomes an aspect of the cultural heritage, which can itself be
13 Official Website, Sveti Sedmochislenitsi. < Retrieved January 9, 2012.
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perceived through architecture. Buildings from Sofia's past are woven into the city. The Presidency, an
imposing Leviathan built during Socialist times, wraps itself around a Roman round basilica from the
early 4
th
century. Across the street, the National Archeology Museum rests on top of Roman ruins – you
can admire them up close when you eat in the basement of the fancy cafè (the “Art Club Museum”) –
and the museum's building itself is yet another retired mosque. Not far down the boulevard, the old
King's Palace was originally an Ottoman cavalry building. All architecture in the city center is like this,
morphed and reborn for new functions from its previous incarnation. Individual buildings and their
spiritual overtones are immured into the city's stones. The ancient souls supporting individual
constructions, then, are continuously transferred up the layers of the vertical axis, one age to the next,
gathering the memories and souls of our ancestors into the architecture. Like an avalanche through
time, the immuring sweeps up everything along its path and grows, ever-larger, ever-stronger.
No bend can stop an avalanche. Ignorant of the futility, Socialist architecture tried very hard to
start anew. Architects strove to escape allusions to the past in their buildings, visual or ideological. In
this goal, Socialism was about as successful as a rebellious layer of sand clinched between basalt

deposits: no matter how drastically different, still a part of the geologic structure. Within the city
context, the peculiarity of Soviet construction is precisely what makes it more obviously a historical
layer, albeit an alienated one. Socialist architecture made Sofia into a city of contrasts, endlessly
juxtaposing its imposing, broad-stroke fronts to the finely detailed facades of earlier 19
th
century
buildings and clashing its visually squared squares with the uneven pavements and rounded corners of
old-city piazzas. But in the end Soviet architects achieved the opposite of what they tried to do.
Accustomed to tracing such contradictions, the eye of a Sofian pedestrian sees them as the parts of a
whole, adjacent pieces to a puzzle.
Socialist architecture generally preferred starting from scratch over reclaiming old spaces.
Vertically, it accomplished this by claiming the sky – from three to four story buildings before WWII to
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the height of the panelki, which can sometimes be twenty or more stories high. Horizontally, Soviet
architecture tended to populate areas of town that had not previously been claimed. In the 70s, Soviet
city-planning even took the trouble to expand the city center with the construction of NDK, the
National Palace of Culture („Национален дворец на културата“, Nazionalen Dvoretz na Kulturata).
The gigantic complex created a second focus point for city life, one dominated to this day by the
slippery marble of NDK square.
However, the tendency to conquer new space was not absolute, and it bears one significant
exception. Large parts of the old city center were remastered after World War II bombings left them in
dust and ruins. This violent reshaping of space is particularly relevant to my family, since my maternal
great-grandfather's house on Kaloyan Street was razed in a bombing as my great-grandfather sat inside.
Prababa and dyado Hristo had been out of town when they received the bombings warning, yet
pradyado had stayed in Sofia to work. When prababa came back to where the house had been, all she
found were ruins – and a “Remington” typewriter, which had belonged to pradyado.
They never found his body and I will never know what prababa must have felt upon her return.
My understanding of her sorrow is distant but oddly visceral – like the typewriter, which we still have.
Both the grief and the relic were passed down to dyado and then to mama before they came to me; and
both were no longer truly a part of this world by the time I was born. I have never typed on the

“Remington”; I have never spoken to prababa. And yet, how could I not feel her pain? She came back
to see her home transformed into an unsanctified grave for her husband, forever immured, with
associations she could never live with. My family no longer owns the lot on Kaloyan Street. Prababa
sold it, because it was too painful for her to own, and there is now a hotel where pradyado's house used
to stand – one of many new structures to replace old Sofia's demolished central streets.
Sometimes, in my strange and belated nostalgia, I go online to look up pictures from the area of
pre-war Sofia I'll never see. I often wish that we could still have that town, still own that house. I think
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I would have loved to walk down Market Street, with its wide sidewalks, the tramway in the middle,
and the view to the fountain in front of the King Palace's old gate. There were buildings in that part of
town to rival Vienna, houses designed to break hearts. Which is precisely what the bombs were aimed
at, I suppose, and precisely what they did. My unfounded longing for these lost streets makes me
wonder if pradyado's death was not a different, larger sort of immuring. Perhaps his shadow was built
into the dust-and-bones memory of lost old Sofia, into the image of what the city had been before the
war, so that I might feel my odd connection to that lost place. Or perhaps it is exactly the reverse, a
demuring. Perhaps pradyado's soul was uprooted from that place and escaped, like the shadow of a
Bulgarian Peter Pan, smuggled into his “Remington” typewriter. If you typed on the machine today,
would the words on the page be pradyado's?
This is a story he might have told. In the Kozlodui house – in the walls, between two roof-tiles,
under a floor-board, somewhere – lies hidden gold. I did not know about it until a couple of years ago,
when I overheard mama and my brother discussing it at dinner. Right there and then, my grandparents'
home, which had always smelled of cozy, plain, and old before, came to new life for me. It was as if I
had opened the door to baba's beautiful wooden wardrobe and stared straight into Narnia – as if
pradyado's ghost had risen up to type at night and lent mysterious splendor to the house with his
ghostly words.
The gold belonged to pradyado's wife. It was a rare piece of jewelry: a string of golden coins
that had been passed down in her family for generations. When prababa died, however, dyado hid his
mother's treasure somewhere in the house. We don't know where. Our aunt Emma (mama's first cousin)
once eavesdropped on a conversation between dyado and a relative:
“Where is the gold?” asked the relative.

“Safe. I've hidden it within the house, where nobody will look,” dyado replied.
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