Never Forget Your Past! New Life for Buzludzha Monument - Bulgaria

A building full of contrasts. With traces of Socialism and the Transition. A monument that from a sacred place becomes rejected and contradictory. A place with the potential to provoke people to ask questions and where there will be a new life.

This describes the monument of Buzludzha and the ideas of architect Dora Ivanova, creator of Project Buzludzha Foundation and engine of the initiative aimed to preserve the monument built 40 years ago in Stara Planina.

We met with her to find out how she sees the future of the monument and the area around it which, in her words, attract thousands of Bulgarians and foreigners throughout the year, regardless of the weather and despite the lack of anything - markings, toilet, access to the building.

"And everyone who gets there wants to see the building inside," says architect Ivanova, citing research done by her team.

She insists on the definition of "conservation", not "restoration", because in her opinion the monument should be preserved as it is at the moment, with all the symbols left on it, and the future generations to decide whether it is right to restore it it looked in 1981 and make the building functional. About 2,500 square meters of thick copper plates werestolen in a short period, in a quite organized way. By people who within a day managed to make as much money as a few salaries. And this is the main reason for the dire state of the monument today, according to Ivanova. It is inexplicable to her how much work has been put into the destruction of the monument.

The interest of architect Dora Ivanova to the monument on the historical Buzludzha Peak is documented in her thesis, with which she completed her higher education in architecture in Berlin, Germany. It described in detail...