Meanwhile… in Bulgaria

Over the years I’ve visited my fair share of abandoned buildings.  They’ve always held a very strong attraction for me.  Somehow, their silent decaying facades offer the perfect blank canvas for an introverted imagination like mine… literally allowing me to conjure up vivid images of the past in my present.  Unfortunately, I fear that this may be the best opportunity I have to experience the reality of time travel in my life time, something that I’ve fantasised about incessantly since I was a small child.

It has to be said, that when I was younger there were a hell of a lot more interesting derelict buildings around.  These days, in my country at least, it’s very unfashionable to let a significant building die gracefully.  Aside from the money-making implications, we tend to feel that we are somehow disrespecting our heritage by allowing them to decay, and so, often we attempt to stop the march of time by tidying them up and imprisoning them behind a red rope, preserving them in a most awkward state of disrepair for future generations to line up and look at from a viewing platform.  The ironic thing is that abandoned buildings feel alive to me.  They are involved in a beautiful natural process that the act of preservation will, by its nature, halt and kill.

Of course my opinion is an unfairly idealised and overly romantic one.  The argument for preserving old buildings is a very strong one that I wholeheartedly support myself.  However.  On the rare occasions that I get to visit a forgotten building as magnificent as this one, I can’t help day dreaming about some of the incredible monumental relics I know back home and quietly wishing that a few more of them had been left to grow old and perish naturally rather than being unceremoniously hooked up to the proverbial life support machine of modern tourism as is so often the case these days.

full article here.