A Memorable Trip to Bulgaria

My parents were wonderful and did the best they could to give me a happy childhood despite the oppressing life surrounding us. They were part of the hard-working, blue-collar proletariat. Not that it would have made that much of a difference had they been college graduates unless they were communist party members. All were paid poorly and had the same living conditions.

Doctors, nurses, lab techs, and other medical professionals could be bribed with “walking-around money” to do their jobs faster and with more interest, otherwise it was the same mantra, “we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”  They were the communist regime.

Despite what people thought, not all citizens were communist party members, only a small percentage were allowed inside the “rarefied” world of the Bolsheviks.  You had to have a perfect dossier – poor people who never owned anything, envious losers with a talent for worthless gab of lying and deceiving people, or a criminal who did not mind selling his/her parents out for a dime.

One thing my parents could not give me was vacations because they’ve never been on a vacation themselves. It was way beyond their financial means. The communist party members’ kids always got free vacations in the summer at the Black Sea and skiing in Sinaia, on the then famous international ski slope, free housing, free food, and free travel there.

The rest of us stayed home in summertime or worked and read books, trying to imagine what it would be like to enjoy the Black Sea. Lucky for me, mom’s oldest brother lived on the Black Sea shore, and I got to stay a few times in his family’s apartment. My parents had to come up with the train ticket and a few dollars for the bus and an occasional bottle of “suc,” a type of soda. We had no idea then that Pepsi and Coke existed. That was the extent of my traveling in and out of the country.

Back in the spring1977 we had a horrible earthquake which killed and traumatized many people especially in Bucharest. I was a student at that time and every morning I had to walk past the many collapsed buildings to get to class. It was traumatizing us every day on the way to the university.

My parents decided to take some cash out of their meager savings to send me on a class trip to Sophia, Bulgaria. The bus ride was cheap, and we bought our own food. We did not need a passport nor a visa to travel there – they were communists just like us, but their country had a more humane leader, and the regime was what I called “communism light.” Our communism was on steroids thanks to Ceausescu who pushed us into maximum poverty while they lived in the lap of luxury and excesses.

Bulgaria was beautiful and we marveled at the many well-stocked, located below ground restaurants. My guess was that it must have been their way of keeping peace and quiet in the streets at night. Bulgarians had better food, their stores were supplied with all necessities and so were their pharmacies. I realized then how much harder our lives were in Romania with its empty grocery stores and pharmacies.

The most lugubrious part of our short stay in Bulgaria was the ceremonial tomb of Georgi Dimitrov on Prince Alexander of Battenberg Square in Sofia. His embalmed body was on display in the same manner as Lenin’s body is preserved to this day.  Motionless guards in uniform were flanking the entrance.

Built in six days in 1949, the marble mausoleum contained the embalmed body of Georgi Dimitrov, the first leader of Communist Bulgaria. When the second communist leader, Vasil Kolarov, died in 1950, he was buried in the second niche of the east wall. The tomb was destroyed in 1999 by Ivan Kostov’s government, following a contentious public debate. Why would they desecrate a tomb and destroy what was part of their history? It was an effort of the post-communist era to erase as much of communism as possible. The prime minister felt that it was inappropriate to keep since communism “fell” in 1989. Did it really fall? Of course not, it was reorganized under the umbrella of globalism.

The demolition started in August 21, 1999, and, after three failed attempts, the building finally collapsed on the fourth blasting on August 27, 1999.

The mausoleum was completed in such a short period, enough time for Dimitrov’s body to be brought to Sofia from the USSR. In August 1990, Dimitrov’s remains were cremated and the ashes buried in Central Sofia Cemetery.

When I returned home, I narrated in detail this awful part of our visit to my dad, and he exclaimed, “You just cannot easily escape communism, it is like a plague. Even in death the tyrants are mummified and placed in marble palaces while the rest of us freeze and starve.”