Pametnik na Savetskata armia

Worth a detour

The Soviet Army monument on Troykata square, put up between 1952 and 1953 and known to everyone as Alyosha, stands in the middle of the pedestrian street where the concerts and the markets happen. About eighteen metres, with bronze reliefs of the war and of the Soviet army being welcomed into Burgas in 1944. It is free, unavoidable, and still argued about.

Story

Background

Three people made it: the architect Minko Minkov and the sculptors Vasil Radoslavov and Aneta Atanasova. The soldier stands with his left arm raised, and the reliefs around the base show scenes of the Second World War and the arrival of Soviet troops in the city in September 1944.

Since November 1989 it has been contested. There have been repeated calls for its removal, repeated defences of it, and repeated attacks with paint. This is not peculiar to Burgas — the same argument runs wherever such monuments stand in Bulgaria — but here the monument is not tucked away in a park. It is in the middle of the busiest square in the city, under which the town holds its concerts, its Christmas market and its sporting events, and the two things simply coexist.

Do not confuse it with the Alyosha in Plovdiv, which is a different and much larger monument on a hill and shares only the nickname. And be aware that the situation can change: the Soviet Army monument dismantled in Sofia from December 2023 was Sofia's, not this one, and at the time of writing this one still stands and is still described in the present tense by the municipality. If you are interested in what Bulgaria does with this part of its past, the square is a better place to think about it than any museum in the city.