About 2,000 years ago, the Romans invented an ingenious way to deal with the frequent change of emperors and the costly replacement of statues of the incumbent ruler that stood all over the place. Instead of making new monuments from head to toe, they would replace only the heads.

In Bulgaria this tradition has revived independently. It largely goes unnoticed, because the public discourse is dominated by the small, yet extremely vocal "urban right wing" that calls, mostly on Facebook, for the demolition of all Communist monuments in the country. Bulgaria did start purging itself of Communist-era memorials in the early 1990s, when statues and reliefs of Lenin and Communist dictator Georgi Dimitrov disappeared from all public spaces overnight. Memorials to the Soviet Army are perceived as particularly offensive by the "urban right wing." However, most Communist public art is still in place.

There is a third, more delicate approach to the matter. Just like the ancient Romans, some contemporary Bulgarians have found creative ways to repurpose old monuments and give them a new, often radically different, meaning.

In Chirpan, it was the Communists who reused an older military monument to serve their ideological goals

Surprisingly, the trend started under... Communism.

Communist Bulgaria was determined to build as many imposing monuments as possible: visual propaganda pushing the official version of truth and history down the throats of ordinary Bulgarians was an integral part of the regime. However, in some places pragmatic Communists eagerly reused older monuments and public art pieces.

The most blatant example is in Chirpan. The local comrades decided that the town's old war memorial, built in the 1930s to honour the local men who died in the wars of 1912-1918, was a good way to glorify... victims of the 1923 September Uprising and Communist guerilla fighters. The monument got a star, a new inscription and a heroic relief depicting partizani. It was not changed after the regime collapsed in 1989.

The Communists also changed the fence of the former Military School in Veliko Tarnovo. The fence was built before the 1940s around what used to be the barracks of the 18th Etar Veliko Tarnovo Infantry Regiment and decorated with Bulgarian lions and royal crowns. After 1944 the crowns, a symbol of tsarist power, were covered in hats that had red five-pointed stars on them. After 1989 some of the hats were removed and the crowns restored. But not all... Sadly, the fence is falling into decay at the moment.

The most extravagant examples of monuments changing their ideological meaning were from the 1990s and the 2000s.

Following the If-It-Ain't-Broke-Don't-Fix-It principle, some Bulgarian towns refurbished their Communist-era monuments to give them a new, modern message: the old times are gone, we should not forget them, but we have to go forward.

The effect is often of common sense prevailing, but sometimes it becomes comical.

Pleven's fraternal mound to Communists and anti-fascists is now also dedicated to the fallen in the 1877-1878 Russo-Turkish War

Pleven is amongst the best examples. Similar to other large Bulgarian towns, Pleven also had a Red Army monument, called Alyosha, in its centre. In 1991 the then mayor dismantled the bronze statue and sent it to a scrap metal warehouse. Its pediment remained empty until 1999, when it became part of a memorial to those who died for Pleven's freedom. Old glory does not fade away, though. Until the present day supporters of Communism continue to hold celebrations there, for example on 9 May, which they call Victory Day.

The fate of the fraternal mound in the centre of Pleven is similar. Originally, the monument, situated in front of the Military Club, was dedicated to those who fought against fascism and capitalism, and was crowned with a five-pointed star. After 1989, the star was replaced with a Cross of Courage, and the monument was also dedicated to the Bulgarians who died in the 1877-1878 Russo-Turkish War. The five-pointed star can still be seen, however. All you have to do is go round the monument and look at its back.

It is not only because of ideological reasons that Communist monuments have been integrated into modern life and the contemporary urban environment. Sometimes the motivation has been purely pragmatic. An oddly egg-shaped monument to the September 1923 Uprising near Nova Zagora was thus turned into a restaurant.

Haskovo is another great example – there, a site of Communist veneration has become... a religious site.

Haskovo's famed Virgin Mary with Baby Jesus is erected on top of an earlier Communist monument

In 2004, Haskovo appeared in the Guinness Book of Records thanks to its 14-metre-tall statue of the Holy Virgin holding a young Christ in her hands and standing upon a pediment that also served as a chapel. It was declared to be the highest in the world. The Virgin was placed on a 17-metre-high split pyramid built as a memorial to members of the BKP's youth wing. The monument was to have an inner chamber with stained glass depicting the Heart of Danko (Danko was the character of Soviet writer Maxim Gorky, a Stalinist, who led his people into a battle for freedom and whose heart continued to glow even after he died). The stained glass piece proved difficult to make in addition to being expensive, and so the monument was left unfinished and started to crumble – until 2004, when it was turned into a monument to the Holy Virgin.

One of the most poignant of these reimaginations is in Harmanli, a town close to the border with Turkey and Greece. In the 1970s or the 1980s, one of these public art pieces that were ubiquitous in the People's Republic of Bulgaria appeared beside the main street: a bronze statue of a woman with a raised hand that supposedly represented the country's bright Communist future. When Bulgaria joined the EU, in 2007, someone welded the EU's stars and the sign of the euro to the woman's raised hand: an easy way to showcase the propaganda of the new era. At the time of writing, Bulgaria has still not adopted the euro, and euroscepticism in the country runs high.