Soviet Theatre, Bulgaria

The abandoned Soviet Theatre lays hidden in a Bulgarian mountain village. The theatre was once part of a larger community center, which itself dates back to the 1860s. The prominent yellow building is tucked away in a rural town, deep in the Balkan Mountains. The windows are crudely boarded with planks, the original windows long since gone. The theatre itself has been abandoned since the 1990s. Since then it has been silent and empty.

A forlorn grand piano lies to the side of the stage. Its legs buckled as the decades have taken their toll. The lid has been removed. The split and fraying strings cascade in a twisted matted clump over the left side of the piano. Emblazoned above the stage is the phrase “Постоянството постига идеята”; “persistence achieves the idea”.

The stage has suffered water damage and is beginning to collapse as the timbers rot away. The ground floor seating remains mostly intact, but the upper-tier seating has been ripped up over the last few years. These removed seats rest in a jumbled pile above their lower floor companions. The upper-tier curved balconies are fractured and crumbling, and the rusty steel reinforcing the concrete peaks through. The theatre has an Art Nouveau (or possibly Art Deco) feeling, with these curved balconies.

Is this a real “Soviet Theatre”?

Searching for the history of this location online will uncover a variety of photography websites (hopefully, including this one 😉 ). The romantic backstory is that this abandoned theatre was used as a cinema by the Soviet government to show films of the state, until the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1991.

The Bulgarian Communist Party, although allied with the USSR, was never part of the Soviet empire. However, Bulgaria was indeed part of the Eastern (or Soviet) Block up until 1989, when the Bulgarian Communist Party began to drift away from relations with the USSR. With this in mind, it is unlikely that propaganda files originating from Russia were shown here.

Recent developments at the Soviet Theatre

After gaining social media notoriety in recent years, the local township has be roused to act. After calling a public discussion and site survey, the theatre has been declared a cultural monument. The building has been sealed, and security measures put in place to protect it. Discussions of the future of this building are now underway.

Our visit to the dilapidated theatre

We visited Bulgaria in early 2017, greeted by knee-deep snow and temperatures of -15 Celsius. We visited this theatre on the way to the impressive Communist Party Headquarters, Buzludzha. A perfect way to start the day, and prepare us for the wintry climb up a mountain to Buzludzha several hours later. It is a shame not a lot of history can be found about this decaying, crumbling Soviet Theatre.