PostCommunism

Londoners, especially, will be bemused to discover that decades before Norman Foster designed the world famous Gherkin in the City the workers in the oil refinery of Burgas got their own avant-garde housing project that in more than one way not only predated but also outshines one of Sir Norman's major achievements.

To appreciate the social, cultural and architectural significance of the Cucumber in Burgas, which now fervently aspires to become the European Capital of Culture in 2032, one needs to consider the historical background.

Since the Arab Spring in the early 2010s, news of people killed at Bulgaria's border with Turkey has been a regular news feature. Sometimes the victims are Bulgarian border police, shot in skirmishes or killed in traffic accidents involving cars carrying illegal migrants. At other times it is the migrants who die, often in unclear circumstances. According to the authorities, their deaths are usually accidental. However, reports by local and international human rights NGOs, such as Mission Wings and Amnesty International Bulgaria, paint a bleaker picture.

"Where is the parliament?" A few years ago anyone asking this question in Sofia would have been pointed to a butter-yellow neoclassical building at one end of the Yellow Brick Road. Imaginatively, it resembles the Paris Opera House and has the Belgian national motto, "Unity Makes Strength," above its main façade, looking onto the equestrian statue of a 19th century Russian tsar. This was the place where Bulgarian MPs used to gather to forge this country's laws and regulations.

A former hotel, abandoned in the mountains and kept off limits by a group of mysterious guards. A former foreign minister stumbling upon the road that leads to it, and gets arrested. Rumours of something sinister hidden deep beneath it.

No, this is not the elevator pitch for a TV series based on the mysterious deaths of six people connected to a hut in Petrohan. This is the story of Object 17, which the hacks sometimes dub "Bulgaria's Area 51."

The narrow, claustrophobic space seems to press in on you. The smell of machine oil, metal and people. The sense of the unknown… Descending into a submarine is an unforgettable experience. If you want to try it – and learn more about Bulgaria's submarines – your destination is Beloslav, a town west of Varna. Here, on the southern shore of Lake Varna, is a surprising museum: the last submarine of the Bulgarian Navy. Its name – Slava, or Glory.

Beyond the E871 highway and after the last premises of Sofia's Business Park, a white metal palisade shields an immense building site. The borehole drilling resonates from within. The summer sun is burning. With Vitosha mountain against a clear blue sky for a background, a sandy country lane meanders up a plateau.

Colourful weeds grow tall on both sides of the lane. Modest houses in peeling orange, green or yellow hide behind the old trees. Above them, towers a massive concrete structure, rising from the plateau: Kambanite, or The Bells.

When the young Patrick Leigh Fermor – a man considered one of the 20th century greatest travel writers – visited Ruse in 1934, he stumbled upon a strange town.

Stretching for over 12 km, the sand ribbon by the Black Sea between Shkorpilovtsi to the south and Kamchiya to the north is a quiet spot blessed with clean sand, pristine sea and a thick longoz forest abuzz with wildlife, including the region's notorious mosquitoes. Many Bulgarians go to Kamchiya beach in summer, as it never gets crowded and accommodation is cheap. You can choose between rundown bungalows built under Communism or free camping. Construction in the area is prohibited, as a significant part of it belongs to a nature reserve.

From Roswell to Project Blue Book in the United States and Project Condign in the UK, the military have always been interested in finding possible extraterrestrials on planet Earth. The Bulgarian Army is no exception. But its efforts to make contact with possible aliens have nothing to do with the image of gloomy researchers sifting through grainy photographs of UFOs and interviewing frightened locals who claim to have been abducted by little green men.

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.

Prehistoric goddesses dancing in dark caves. Thick forests climbing up forbidding mountains, moist from the breath of hidden waterfalls. Intriguing museums where ancient gold treasures share space with... a nuclear power plant model. Red rocks frozen in phantasmagorical shapes, with macabre stories to add. Winding rivers passing by abandoned Communist-era monuments and factories, and picturesque monasteries. Towns that have seen better times, but still strive to reinvent themselves. Roman ruins amid drab modern houses.

Under Communism, there was hardly a place in Bulgaria without a monument to Lenin, or at least a street, a school, or a kindergarten named after him. Sofia, the capital, had a tall statue of him in front of the Largo, where the main institutions of the People's Republic of Bulgaria were situated.

Juicy, aromatic and bursting with the tender sweetness that comes only after ripening under the strong Balkan sun: the tomatoes that you can find on a Bulgarian plate taste like nothing else. From salad and stews to the emblematic lyutenitsa paste, they are a staple of local cuisine and a source of pride for their supposedly unique deliciousness. The fake news that the EU was planning to ban local tomatoes enraged hundreds of thousands of Bulgarians in the 2010s and 2020s.

When she saw Bulgaria's "Flying Saucer," the bizarre-looking monument on top of the summit of Buzludzha in the Stara Planina mountain range, Dora Ivanova was 12. A native of Montana, formerly named Mihaylovgrad (after a local Communist functionary), she was taken to the nearby Freedom Monument at Shipka Pass and the set of monuments commemorating the 1877-1878 Russo-Turkish War by her parents. She saw the oddly-shaped Memorial House of the Bulgarian Communist Party, as its official name was, from a far distance. Her parents never bothered to do the steep drive up the mountain.

How often do you hum, while driving or doing chores, Uriah Heep's song July Morning? Is it on your Spotify? The answers are probably "never" and "no." Uriah Heep was an English rock band that was formed in 1969, named after Charles Dickens's infamous character. It did make a name for itself in the 1970s, but remained largely unknown.

The fourth iteration of the OPEN BUZLUDZHA festival is scheduled to kick off on 8 August and will last for three nights/four days. A plethora of local and international club scene bands will converge on the lawn beneath the controversial former Communist Party House Monument on Mount Buzludzha, informally referred to as the UFO. These include Wickeda, Hayes & Y, Kerana and the Cosmonauts, Two Cities One World, Funkilicious, Heptagram and others.

Unlike other countries in Central and Eastern Europe, which removed, stashed away or demolished most remnants of their Communist past as early as the 1990s, Bulgaria is a curiosity. It continues to maintain at least a dozen monuments to the Red Army. Some are gargantuan and placed in various top locations in bigger cities, some are small and unobtrusive. Urbexers and lovers of quaint and bizarre trivia will be bemused to discover that none of these remnants of the Communist past in actual fact commemorate any... real-life story.

Some monuments impress with their size, artistic value or historical significance, and some have a hidden history to match. Sofia, as Bulgaria's capital, has a particularly high concentration of monuments and statues with unusual backgrounds. Some of these are just oddities and curiosities that add a pinch of spice to otherwise official public art and have become ingrained in the city's history. However, others are controversial and have caused various debates through the years.

A white mammoth dominates the upper part of Boulevard Todor Aleksandrov in central Sofia. Its massive, concrete surfaces are imposing. Looking from the lower ground of the Serdica station, the building, Unicredit Bulbank's headquarters, resembles a giant ocean steamer which is about to crush the Largo, the vast space surrounded by the Stalinist Council of Ministers, the Office of the President and the former Communist Party House, now parliament.

It has become a commonplace that a nation can be understood best by the sort of treatment it give its poets rather by its military victories or GDP levels. This notion may be a bit outdated in a world run by social media where electronic "devices" by far outnumber fountain pens, and where a "content creator" makes more than a teacher of literature. But it is still at least indicative. Bulgaria, whose writers and poets have been translated into English only sporadically, is a case in point. On the one hand, it is very proud of its literary heritage.