Appropriating the Buzludzha Monument Wim

University of Amsterdam (Never) Forget Your Past? Appropriating the Buzludzha Monument Wim Schepers rMA Cultural Analysis: Thesis Supervisor: dr. Boris Noordenbos Second Reader: dr. Esther Peeren 15 June 2015 Schepers 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: AN ENCOUNTER WITH THE BUZLUDZHA MONUMENT ……………………….. 3 CHAPTER 1: HISTORY ANEW – THE MECHANICS OF EASTERN EUROPEAN NOSTALGIA……….. 11 CHAPTER 2: HOW THE EAST WAS WON – WESTERN HEGEMONY IN EASTERN EUROPE………… 21 CHAPTER 3: BACK TO THE FUTURE – ANATOMIZING THE BUZLUDZHA MONUMENT………….. 28 CONCLUSION: A SINCERE FAREWELL………………………………………………………… 54 LIST OF WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………………….. 58 Schepers 3 INTRODUCTION: AN ENCOUNTER WITH THE BUZLUDZHA MONUMENT A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism. - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Within the Stara Planina mountain range in central Bulgaria, atop the desolate Buzludzha peak, stands the now crumbling House Monument of the Bulgarian Communist Party. Inaugurated in 1981 by the nation’s communist government to commemorate the founding of the Bulgarian Social Democratic Party a hundred years earlier, the monument was abandoned and has fallen into disrepair since Bulgaria’s renunciation of communism and the establishment of a democratic government in 1990. Recently, a fierce debate on the proposed restoration of the monument has prompted the government to bequeath the edifice to the Bulgarian Socialist Party, successor of the former Communist Party. However, as of yet no attempts have been made to rehabilitate the structure (see fig. 1). Fig. 1. Schepers, Wim. “The Buzludzha monument within the Stara Planina mountain range.” 2015. JPEG File. Schepers 4 Driving along the redeveloped E85, which cuts through the Bulgarian hinterland, a brand new signpost designating Buzludzha as a “place of interest” interrupts the valley’s monotonous barrenness (see fig. 2). Neatly it labels the distance still to traverse: 17 kilometers. Its familiar, stylized imagery and its recognizable brown color, a common denominator of such signs all over Europe, incorporates the Buzludzha monument within the area of safely delineated tourist attractions at which locals wile away their Sunday afternoons. However, the dilapidated statue to which the sign deftly points and which marks the onset of the mountain road winding up towards the Buzludzha site immediately mocks this presumption (see fig. 3). The memorial, depicting Hadzhi Dimitar, a warlord who played a decisive role in Bulgaria’s struggle for independence from the Ottoman occupants, is in a state of severe disrepair. Its tiles have been smashed, graffiti defiles its surface, its pedestal is overgrown with weeds. However, despite its deplorable state, the sculpture, flanked by a stone pillar, still emanates an aura of stern authority and unflinching power. Rising up ponderously in the arid Bulgarian landscape Hadzhi Dimitar gazes grimly across the valley, defying the Bulgarian nation’s adversaries. This decaying remnant of a once powerful regime is not quite a welcoming entrée to one of Bulgaria’s biggest ideological monuments. Fig. 2. Schepers, Wim. “Buzludzha signpost.” 2015. Fig. 3. Schepers, Wim. JPEG File. “Memorial.” 2015. JPEG File. Schepers 5 Unfortunately, the statue’s dispiriting appearance is only a premonition to the lamentable condition of the entire Buzludzha site. In order to reach the monument itself, visitors travel up a once well-kept mountain road lined with memorials commemorating the 1877-1878 Russo-Turkish war, spacious parking spots, which support an unimpeded view of the valley below, and quaint fountains replenishing the weary traveller with fresh mountain spring water. However, as the government no longer maintains the access route, Buzludzha’s infrastructure is nowadays in a state of severe deterioration. Venturing towards the monument is an enterprise requiring indispensable safety precautions. For, driving up the mountain road includes braving patches of snow, fallen trees, knee-deep potholes forcing the motorist to the opposite side of the driveway and dangerously narrow passageways at which the road has partly collapsed down the precipice below. Nevertheless, coming into view of the Buzludzha monument itself is a more than ample reward for the trying expedition uphill. As the dense temperate forest makes way for the windswept highlands, characteristic of the Stara Planina mountain range, two colossal hands holding torches, which supposedly symbolize the lasting friendship between the USSR and the Bulgarian nation, mark the final stretch towards the monument. When the low- hanging clouds, which the strong winds sweep over the peak, begin to lift, Buzludzha emerges gradually from the fog. From this distance, the round, UFO-like shape of its central building supported by a rectangular tower broadening towards the top, seems almost delicate and graceful in comparison to the brutal features of the two torches which appear to be carved out of primeval rock. Buzludzha materializes from the fog as a testimony of the outrageous ambitions to which the communist regime aspired. “It’s grand, it’s just insane. It’s the future, you can see the future there,” one of the monument’s visitors asserts in an interview with The Economist (“Buzludzha: A crumbling reminder of communism”). Schepers 6 Laboriously hiking up the stairway from the nearby parking lot offers an indication to the extent of the damage the site has sustained since its abandonment. Electric wires have been unearthed and are now exposed to the harsh weather conditions on the peak and much of the decorative tiles which once paved the steps have disappeared, leaving nothing but their imprint in the sub-soil. Upon ascending the final platform leading to the securely bolted entrance doors, Buzludzha reveals its true dimensions. Standing in front of the entryway, the vast convex shape of the central hall towering above me arches inward and attaches itself to a supporting structure, resembling a pedestal, on which the central hall rests. Despite the numerous cracks in the building’s concrete framework – indicative of sustained water damage – and the countless tag lines besmirching the façade, the monument still manages to convey a sense of its former glory. The matter-of-factness of Buzludzha’s architecture, which distinctly exhibits the individual concrete slabs serving as building blocks for the structure, emphasize its sturdiness and contrast it with the elegant curving shape and the seeming lightness with which the upper hall rests on its base. Buzludzha is grounded in the earth, but at the same time it reaches for the skies, as if this concrete monstrosity could lift-off any moment. In its entirety Buzludzha emanates a sense of forceful supremacy emphasized by the inscription of concrete letters attached to both sides of the façade calling the Bulgarian proletariat to arms. In addition to this roaring Communist propaganda, an anonymous visitor to the monument has adorned the space above the entrance with glaring red graffiti summoning all pilgrims to Buzludzha to “Never Forget Your Past.” In its appearance Buzludzha relates to the New Brutalism. Both a label and an architectural program (Banham 21), New Brutalism originated in the nineteen fifties with Le Corbusier’s 1952 Cité radieuse in Marseille and lived through its heyday in the sixties and seventies. It is characterized, as Reyner Banham argues, by “precisely its brutality, its je- m’en-foutisme, its bloody-mindedness” (23). Its main characteristics include “1, Formal Schepers 7 legibility of plan; 2, clear exhibition of structure; and 3, valuation of materials for their inherent qualities ‘as found’” (23). In practice, Brutalist buildings are typically erected in bare concrete and stripped of all superfluous detail. These structures are deliberately massive in their appearance as they express the sheer functionality and raw materiality of their shape. Brutalism is architecture at its most honest, at its most uncompromising. Hence the derogatory term of “concrete monstrosities” which these structures got allocated after the vogue for Brutalist university buildings, shopping malls and governmental offices subsided. However, in the Soviet Union and its affiliated states, when the communist system started to disintegrate during the seventies, the architectural constraints of the Stalin- and Khrushchev era slackened and young architects gained freedom to experiment. While these new talents, quite unlike their Western colleagues, did not organize themselves in schools, they did borrow much of the West’s leading architectural styles, freely intermingling Brutalism with Neo- futurism and postmodernism, while at the same time harking back to older Western European styles, including the International style, and Soviet favorites such as Constructivism, this way creating still little-known architectural masterpieces like Buzludzha, the Yalta Sanatorium or the Tbilisi ministry of transportation. As Jonathan Glancey argues in a 2011 Guardian article, these buildings could thus “be read as the swansong of a superpower, created by people freed from centralization, looking to and borrowing from the west” (Glancey). Communist Party members would enter the monumental structure through its wide iron gates leading into a marble-clad foyer, after which they would mount one of the two staircases, adorned with red velour, to the vast auditorium in the inner ring of the building. Taking their seats on low benches organized around a central floor, they would have been greeted by

Load more