There doesn't seem to be much on the internet about the Bulgarian Palace of Culture. It's so large, so swollen, so beige-and-brown. And so, no-one seems to notice it.
I can find that it was built in 1981, celebrating the foundation of the Bulgarian nation 1300 years previously. I don't really understand how a Communist-run state was allowed to celebrate its own uniqueness and history. I'm sure it worked in the favour of politburo somehow.
The Palace is the focal point of a large set-piece park, sitting between the city centre and the Vitosha mountain in the distance (where one can ski cheaply with a gleeful disregard for health and safety / self-preservation). The park, like the Palace, has clearly seen better days. An irrigation (an excellent, and made-up, plural noun) of ponds and fountains is dried up and empty, and there was little greenery in the cold March sunlight.
The Monument to the Bulgarian State, also erected by the munificent Soviet overlords in '81, is either falling down or being taken down. It remains as a fragment of something, some shattered hoarded-off thing that youths now graffiti to express their frustration at a time they didn't live through.
Unlike Socialist Realist art, this isn't the usual worker-duping interpretation-resistant propaganda (a happy Soviet soldier with a happy peasant farmer, holding a happy pudgy baby and a basket of food). It looks to me like something horribly wounded. I wonder how Hitler's pet architect, Albert Speer, would have valued this Socialist ruin.
Sited elsewhere, the section of the Berlin Wall might have seen like a celebration of the human spirit over the divisiveness and horror of the Cold War. But here, inscription daubed with more graffiti and on a dirty glass podium, it just seems to be another example of a nasty failure. Perhaps, on balance, the perfect antithesis to Speer's self-serving assertions that his buildings would look wonderful when picturesquely weathered.
Crossing the park to the Palace (there is a old man busking opera, in the cold), there's a Costa coffee (again, I am sorry), and a security man vigilantly doing nothing. The Palace is now just used for conferences and the like. There is a lot of empty space.
An anatomically-improbable statue of Sofia welcomes you into the foyer. A moulded crowd scene of interlocking waves rather counterpoints the emptiness.
Brown signs encourage you up to the empty three-and-a-half-th floor.
There's a startling geometry to the design. Lights like chemical structures hang from a ceiling patterned like graph paper. The treble-height windows create vanishing points with shadows.
On the other side is a tremendous view of the park and the waterless water-features.
The Palace, in its current state, is a mess. Notionally a gift to Bulgaria, it is inevitably more-so a self-aggrandising monument to the Soviet Union. It is falling slowly into disrepair. An overblown symbol of past failure, and the failure of the present to keep the building alive.
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