8/16 Friday
We
plan an urban hike to the Socialist Art Museum, which is somewhere in a
business district that’s beyond our tourist map. We take a city street that
follows a trolley line most of the way, a lot like walking through a NYC neighborhood.
There are all kinds of shops and fast food joints along the way. At one spot,
we find a little take-out window displaying all kinds of nuts and dried fruits.
We order through the window, and pick out a few small bags of kiwi and
strawberries, but we have an awful time trying to buy some walnuts. We point to
the box with walnuts, the cashier woman points to the box next to it, No, that
one, we point again. She points to the box above it, No, THAT one. She points
to the box to the left, then to the right, then below, then two over,
constantly skipping past the box full of walnuts. It’s getting so ridiculous,
we think she must be doing it on purpose, but finally, she hits the right spot,
and we get our little bag of walnuts.
We
follow our street to the edge of the city, where the sidewalk ends and we find
ourselves on a dirt path along a woods next to a highway. We walk for another
mile maybe, then get back to a sidewalk in a new neighborhood with lots of high
rise office buildings that look like mostly banks. We head off the main street
into a side street, looking for some kind of sign for the museum, which we
estimate is somewhere near us. No one speaks much English, and even when Bob
uses his Smartphone translator, we can’t find anyone who’s even heard of the
Museum of Socialist Art. It’s looking a bit grim for this outing, but then
someone overhears us talking with a café owner, and gives us some general
directions, sending us back to the main street for about another twenty minutes
of walking, towards “three big buildings.” We continue as directed, and
actually find the said buildings. Still no museum signage. We ask some people
at another café, and one man leads us around the side of the building, and
points across the street. We can see a gated entrance to a building with a
plaque describing an “Office of the Commission on Competition,” or some such.
Then we see in the back, a sculpture garden full of Lenin statues! We’ve found
it! And indeed, the guard at the “Commission” gate waves us in towards the rear
of the building, where a woman comes out of her station and waves us further
along to the museum entry. Still no sign of signage.
The
sculpture garden is interesting, with massive monuments and smaller works. Most
are of Lenin or other Communist leader, others are honoring the common worker:
a bricklayer in work clothes, joyful peasant women, stylized “workmen.”
Inside,
there is a collection of propaganda posters, all bright Kodachrome colors.
Stalin with schoolchildren, happy farmers, productive peasants, everyone happy,
smiling, shiny. We stop to see a video of some propaganda films, showing grand
pageants of schoolchildren with flowers, marching youths, everyone healthy and
happy! One segment shows a squad of college youths gathered together for a
great project, building a dam. For some reason, the communist college youths
eschew machinery, building the dam with shovels, rakes and their bare hands.
The women make a “fire brigade” line, passing rocks from one to the next,
tossing them into a truck, doing this while wearing skirts and saddle shoes.
The men are standing all along the hillside, picking out rocks that fall down
the hill onto the guys picking just behind them. We’re thinking, “Oh, please
god, someone get a backhoe!”
Well,
that was very interesting. We go home on the metro, very clean and modern. It’s
all new because as it was being built, diggers were continually finding Roman
ruins, stopping everything. It took years to get the metro completed. We make
one transfer and end up just a block from our apartment.
1 Video Included
Sofia Socialist Art Museum
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