The House on the Mountain

This was a ten-year dream. I first saw Buzludzha online as a kid — that grey concrete disc on its stem, marooned on a Bulgarian ridge like a UFO somebody parked and walked away from — and I never stopped wanting to stand inside it. Some places lodge in you that young and just wait. It took me a decade, but I finally went, with friends, and it was every bit the pilgrimage I’d built it up to be.

Getting in is a mission, and that’s half the magic. The grand doors are sealed; the way through is underground, in via the maintenance rooms beneath the monument, feeling along service corridors in the dark until you come up inside — into the great circular hall, under the dome, where daylight falls through the broken roof onto what’s left of the mosaics. We met a few locals down there doing exactly the same thing, friendly, clearly not on their first visit, trading directions like it was a normal Tuesday. There’s a quiet camaraderie among the people who bother to climb up here.

I’d wanted to be inside this thing since I was a child. UFO style, baby — under the dome, in the one room the photos can never quite prepare you for.

The mosaics are the heartbreak. Where the roof has failed, water has gotten into the hall and the faces and fists and red stars are coming away from the wall in flakes, gold and crimson chips collecting in the meltwater on the floor. You can stand under what’s left of the ceiling and watch a slogan lose a letter a year. It was built to be the opposite of abandoned — a hall on the roof of the country, raised by hand and ideology — and then the idea it celebrated dissolved and left the building too remote to demolish, too heavy to forget.

To the top, the hard way

We didn’t stop at the hall. The real prize was finding the route up the tower, and we worked it out together — the climb, the wind getting louder through every gap, that low continuous note the whole structure makes when the air moves through it. Doing it exactly the way we did, no shortcuts, no easy door, with the people I came with — that’s the version of this place I’d dreamed about, and somehow the reality matched.

I arrived in cloud, and for about ninety seconds near the top it lifted: the disc stood clean against blue, monumental and absurd and beautiful, and then the grey closed over it again like a curtain deciding the show was done. Watch it before it’s gone. I mean that literally. The mountain is not negotiating.