Hadzhi Dimitar Peak

Worth a detour

The peak is officially Hadzhi Dimitar and universally called Buzludzha, and it carries the strangest building in Bulgaria: a concrete disc on a plinth, built in 1974–81 to glorify the Communist Party, abandoned since 1989 and stripped. The interior is sealed and unsafe, so this is an exterior visit. Go at the end of the day, when the light is low and the coaches have gone.

Story

Background

Three layers of history are stacked on this 1,441-metre summit. In July 1868 the band led by Hadzhi Dimitar was destroyed here by Ottoman forces and he was killed; the peak was formally renamed after him in 1942, though almost nobody uses that name. In 1891 a group of socialists led by Dimitar Blagoev met in secret on these slopes and founded the party that became the Bulgarian Communist Party. The monument exists because of that second event.

It was designed by the architect Georgi Stoilov, begun on 23 January 1974 and opened on 23 August 1981, built by soldiers, brigade volunteers and paid workers — thousands of people over eight years — and funded substantially by a national donation campaign. The form is a flattened ring on a plinth with a tower carrying two red glass stars. The interior ring was faced with mosaics running the Party's version of Bulgarian history around the wall. It was a ceremonial hall, not a museum: a place to hold the Party's own rites in.

After 1989 it was abandoned, then stripped of anything with scrap value, then weathered for thirty years with the roof open. It is contested ground now, and honestly so. Some Bulgarians want it demolished as a monument to a dictatorship; others want it preserved as the outstanding piece of Bulgarian modernist architecture and as evidence. Europa Nostra listed it among Europe's seven most endangered sites in 2018. The Buzludzha Project Foundation, set up in 2015 by the architect Dora Ivanova, has won Getty Foundation grants — a conservation plan in 2019, emergency stabilisation of the mosaics from 2020 — and works towards eventually opening it as a museum of the period. There is no date for that.