Time Travel to Melnik - Part One - Communism In School

A project with wonderful model and person Alena (there will be more of her sooner or later).

Melnik is the smallest town in Bulgaria. Just about two hundred inhabitants, maybe a little more now that it became a popular destination for tourists again. That is what keeps the local economy going, that and boutique wine. It has been a great market and a place of fairs in distant past, since the times of the Ottoman rule. And that despite the fact that it is isolated between hills and sandy cliffs (which will be coming in Part II of the story).

In a past not so distant its largest building was that of the Highschool. Locals remember when they used to study there and they say it stopped functioning about the year 2000. Its material base was obviously older than that. It has certainly been rich once.

We entered through the not so well blocked front door, our boots and shoes crushing small glass pieces. Just a meter in and we're surrounded by memories - spilled diascope films in their hundreds and maybe thousands, newspapers, old note books and albums, vinyl records and framed portraits, sculptures, what have you.

On the next floor we found the principal's office and the plastic skeleton rolling on the floor, maybe laughing (difficult to tell without the muscle tissue and the skin on). Also classrooms filled with other kinds of archived memory. All of it dedicated to the regime. Homeworks of nine-year-old children, hailing Stalin in strophes. Along with photos of the national or the Soviet ballet, singers, and maybe the casual portrait of a writer, a poet or a scientist who lived before communism. Few of those but they were undesputedly recognized for national heroes nonetheless.

It was a time of heroes after all.

I mean... one can get pretty entangled in so much propaga... sorry, history.