exploring the abandoned

As well as the 'formal' ruins, Bulgaria has countless abandoned houses, factories and other buildings.

In Veliko Tarnovo I poked around three different abandoned places.  The first was a Soviet-era dam, intended to raise the level of the river so that residents of the town could swim in it, but not yet completed at the time of the fall of communism.  The kind of place that would be safely closed off to random passers-by in somewhere like the UK, but just left in Bulgaria for people like me, who are fascinated by abandoned places, to go into at my own risk.

The second I only found thanks to a conversation with a friend of the hostel manager, as I would otherwise have just walked past without realising what was there.  Would your attention be drawn to this building on the right if you walked past it?

I'd been told that down by the river there was an old Roman baths, later used as a hammam by the Ottomans, which had fallen into disrepair and even been used for a while by a small-scale industry next door to store sawdust!  I spotted it as I walked past, and crouched down to look through a 'window' that had been left open - and was quite astonished to see this ancient building, that in most countries would have been cleaned up to serve as a tourist attraction, was now just a repository for the rubbish of passers-by.

I did return the next day with my walking boots on, to wade through the rubbish and look through into the second chamber - although even with my torch I couldn't see the interior that well.

Another tale from the hostel manager's friend concerned the piece of land next to the hostel - just a wilderness when you peered at it over the fence, but rather more interesting underneath.  Apparently a neighbour was digging up the ground in preparation for putting a car park there, but somehow the authorities heard that he seemed to be digging through human remains - it turned out to be an eighth century graveyard!!  So digging was stopped and a fence was put around the land ... and nothing else was done.  So I found a way over the fence, and pushed through the head-high weeds to the back corner, where sure enough, there were some pieces of bone on the ground.  & as I'd been told, on one side the digger had clearly cut down vertically through the middle of a grave, as you can now see the stone slabs and beneath them, various parts of a human skeleton: vertebrae, and broken pieces of skull including part of the jawbone with teeth still in place!!

You might need to enlarge the photo to see what I saw.

Then in Plovdiv I found my way into a couple of abandoned buildings - taking care to avoid the numerous used syringes lying around ...

Hard to articulate why some of us find such places so compelling, as I've been surprised to find that they don't hold the same level of attraction (or indeed any attraction at all!) for some people.  But I've really enjoyed the opportunity to explore such places.