SHUMEN CENTRAL CITY SQUARE [BG]

Exploration #283 Shumen central city square. Conceived in the late 1980s, the Central City Square of Shumen was an ambitious urban megastructure designed to redefine the city center. Interrupted by the political collapse of 1989, the project was never completed and remains one of Bulgaria’s largest unfinished socialist-era constructions.

Designed as a revolutionary civic complex, the project aimed to integrate commercial, administrative, and social functions into a single architectural system. Plans included shops, a hotel, restaurants, cafés, municipal offices, and ceremonial halls, all connected through a vast, multi-level concrete structure extending across an entire city block. At its core stands an imposing 18-storey tower, rising from a six-storey base embedded into the terrain. The complex was conceived with underground levels, tunnel-like passages, and direct connections to nearby buildings such as the Hotel Madara, reflecting a highly modernist vision of urban continuity and functionality.

The redevelopment of the surrounding city center was carried out in parallel, incorporating symbolic elements linked to Bulgarian history. Sculptural motifs and architectural details echoed the nearby Monument to the Founders of the Bulgarian State, creating a cohesive ideological and visual narrative rooted in national identity rather than explicit political symbolism.

However, the fall of the Bulgarian Communist Party in 1989 led to economic instability and the abrupt abandonment of large-scale state projects. The Central City Square became one of many unfinished constructions left behind, though none matched its scale or ambition. Today, the structure stands as a striking example of failed utopian planning—an unfinished vision of a self-contained urban center that reflects both the aspirations and the sudden collapse of late socialist architecture.

URANIUM MINE OFFICE [BG]

Exploration #281. This article shows the former headquarters of a state company that managed uranium mining across Bulgaria from 1945 to 1992. The abandoned offices, built in the 1960s, once coordinated a strategic industry central to Cold War geopolitics, before being deserted after the sector’s collapse.

Following the discovery of uranium deposits near Sofia before World War II, mining activity expanded rapidly under Soviet influence. After the war, a joint Soviet-Bulgarian mining structure was established, supported by hundreds of Soviet engineers. Uranium extracted from local mines was transported to the USSR and became a key resource for early nuclear research, including reactors and possibly atomic weapons. The headquarters later became part of the “Redki Metali” (Rare Metals) organization, which employed around 13,000 workers at its peak and oversaw uranium extraction nationwide. Mining operations were intensive and continuous, often carried out manually and under hazardous conditions, with little protection for workers exposed to radiation.

The industry declined after the fall of communism. In 1991, the centralized system fragmented into smaller entities, and by 1992 the Bulgarian government officially ended uranium mining. Administrative buildings, including this headquarters, were abandoned as the entire sector shut down. Beyond its industrial role, the site is tied to long-term environmental consequences. Decades of extraction and processing contaminated soil and water, with restrictions on agriculture already imposed in the 1980s. Even after closure and rehabilitation efforts, radioactive dust and pollution remain persistent issues in the surrounding region.

MINA CHUKUROVO [BG]

Exploration #278. Mina Chukurovo. First worked in 1856, Mina Chukurovo near Gabra (Sofia Province) became Bulgaria’s oldest coal mine, later privatized in 2002; operations stopped in 2015 and the concession was terminated in 2020.

Located in western Bulgaria, the Chukurovo open-pit mine extracted lignite, a fast-burning coal historically used for power generation and industrial heat. Its modern phase was reshaped after privatization in 2002, when the state granted a 20-year concession—a formal attempt to keep the deposit productive in the post-socialist economy. Beneath the abandoned workings lies a much older story written in geology: the Chukurovo lignite basin belongs to the Sofia coal province and its coal-bearing sediments date to the Helvetian (Middle Miocene), formed by ancient swamp environments later compressed into low-rank coal.

The site’s decline is documented with unusual clarity: in late 2014 procedures began to suspend operations, and in early 2015 major layoffs marked the effective end of mining activity. With extraction halted, Mina Chukurovo shifted from workplace to industrial relic—an austere landscape of cut slopes and infrastructure that now preserves, in place, one of Bulgaria’s longest-running chapters of lignite history.

HAUS DER OFFIZIERE [DE]

Exploration #206 Haus Der Offiziere. Haus Der Offiziere, also known as the Forbidden City or Little Moscow, is a big abandoned military complex located in Wünsdorf, a small town not far from Berlin. The town was the headquarters of the Soviet forces in communist East Germany and was the largest military base in Europe. From 1994 it is abandoned.

The history of this place begins in 1910 when a military training camp and the Prussian military railway were built. The complex “Haus Der Offiziere” was built in 1914 as a military sports school. During first world war Wünsdorf became the headquarters of the Reichswehr, the German military. After the war the site was also used as a gymnastic training camp to take advantage of its facilities and during the race to 1936 Olympic games some of the Olympic team trained here.

Everything changed drastically in 1945 when the town was occupied by the Soviet army and the Germans surrendered without fighting. The soviets transformed Wünsdorf into a closed town which become the largest Soviet military camp outside of the Soviet Union. A daily delivery via a direct rail link from Moscow allowed the town to isolate itself from the surrounding areas, having its own shops, bakery, and hospital. In preparation for the construction of the Berlin wall Commander-in-Chief Marshall Ivan Konew organised the Soviet armoured protection for the project from here. The Haus Der Offiziere was certainly the best most elegant of town with leisure facilities such as a theatre and swimming pool and the locals were not allowed on site to enjoy the luxuries the Soviets had. A giant statue of Lenin stands was also erected in front of the central building.

Wünsdorf changed again in 1994 when the Soviets left the area and its population dropped from about 60.000 to 6.000 people. Many former Soviet buildings were left abandoned and are still up for sale.
Haus Der Offiziere was also abandoned but luckily it was preserved and today is guarded, waiting for future development projects. The statue of Lenin is still in its original position and it is one the few statue still surviving outside Russia.

If you like this exploration you can also have a look to others abandoned military sites in Germany: the CCCP pilot school, the abandoned soviet hospital.

BUZLUDŽA [BG]

Exploration #181. The official name of the Buzludža monument is “Monument House of the Bulgarian Communist Party”. It was built on the Hadzhi Dimitar Peak (until 1942 known as Buzludža Peak), which is close to the geographical centre of Bulgaria. It is the largest ideological monument to the communist regime in Bulgaria. After the political changes in Bulgaria in November 1989, the new government had no interest in this symbol of communism and it was abandoned.

The monument commemorates a secret assembly of socialists from different Bulgarian areas, on 2 August 1891, to form an organized socialist movement, the Bulgarian Social Democratic Party. This assembly was an initiative of the socialist leader Dimitar Blagoev and this new party (from 1894 the Bulgarian Social Democratic Workers’ Party) was in fact a forerunner of the Bulgarian Communist Party, founded in 1919. But there are two more reasons why this spot is important for Bulgarian history. On 18 July 1868, the famous revolutionary Hadzhi Dimitar led his rebels in a final battle against the Ottomans, fought at Buzludža Peak. And on 25 January 1944, Bulgarian partisans ambushed here fascist forces engaged in training exercises, ending up in a fierce fire fight, during which several partisans lost their lives.
The decision to build this monument was taken by the Bulgarian Communist Party on 11 March 1971. Its construction began in January 1974 and was financed with donations and the sale of stamps, in total worth more than 14 million Bulgarian Leva (nowadays about 35 million USD). The monument, a round domed building with a 70m high double pylon, was designed by a team led by the architect Georgi Stoilov. The structures were designed by professor engineer Dobromir Kolarov. The Monument House of the Bulgarian Communist Party was unveiled on 23 August 1981 by party and state leader Todor Zhivkov.

To build a stable foundation for the monument, about 9m of the peak had to be levelled; 15,000m³ of rock was dug out, reducing the height of Hadzhi Dimitar Peak from 1441 to 1432m. A total of 70,000 tons of concrete, 3,000 tons of reinforced steel and 40 tons of gilded glass were used for the construction, involving more than 6,000 builders and workers. At the top of the double pylon, on its wide sides, are two irregular 5-pointed stars, made of red glass and measuring 6.5 x 12m (the largest in the world). The stars had lighting fixtures; at darkness, they could be seen from far away.

The round domed building consists mainly of the ceremonial hall with a corridor around it, covered with a copper roof of about 2500m². The round ceremonial hall is decorated with mosaics with a total area of 510m². The hall is surrounded by a corridor with large glass windows, and 14 mosaics covering the walls. More than 60 artists needed about 18 months to create the interior artistic design. All mosaics together cover a surface of about 920m². In the ceiling of the hall, one can still see the mosaic ‘Proletarians from all countries, unite!’, with the communist symbol hammer and sickle.

After the political changes in Bulgaria in November 1989, the new government had no interest in this symbol of communism and it was abandoned. Soon afterwards, the last employees left and the doors were locked. In the following years, the monument deteriorated. It became subject to theft, vandalism and weather influences. The building began to crumble, glass was broken, mosaics, ornaments and other elements of the monument’s structure were torn down. Everything in the building worth stealing, was stolen, including the copper covering the roof.
Several initiatives to preserve the monument had been undertaken throughout the years, not with much success. The latest initiative started in 2019 and after investigation, a Conservation Management Plan was made and it was indicated that the monument could be saved. In 2020, works started to stabilize the surviving mosaic panels. These conservation and preservation efforts are still ongoing.

These photo are from my visit in March 2017 (fog and snow) and March 2018. Nowadays the monument is being renovated.  

CUG – COMBINATULUI DE UTILAJ GREU [RO]

Exploration #145. This building is part of a huge plant created in 1970, during the most prolific years of the communist regime in Romania. Energy oriented equipment were here produced, like household boilers or industrial boilers. From 1976 the plant was expanded to metal and steel sector, production of oxygen, laboratories for mechanical and chemical tests, mechanical presses for car parts casting, hydraulics engineering. In 1985 around 8000 employees were working in this factory. After the fall of the communist regime, the needs of heavy machinery felt down dramatically and the factory got split in many different companies. In 2002, only 617 employees were still working there, leaving a big part of the site totally empty.

Today some companies are still running their business in some buildings, while other are empty. This is the vastest abandoned building and probably one of the vastest building of the former plant. Even if it has been abandoned quite a long time ago, and despite the obvious traces of decay, the building has been kept quite clean and now it is like a modern cathedral

(source: Combinatul de Utilaj Greu CUG).

VEB CHEMIEWERK RÜDERSDORF [DE]

Exploration #143. This former cement, then phosphate, chemical factory is located in the city of Rüdersdorf which dates back to the 13th century. It was around this time that the local settled farmers encountered large chunks of limestone when they tried plowing their fields. Little did the farmers know that they stumbled upon the resource which would be used to build the grandeur of Berlin for centuries to come.
The use of limestone saw rapid adoption and by 1600 it was realized that calcium oxide, otherwise known as quicklime, used in making cement and mortar, could have been produced by burning the limestone and dousing it with water. Rüdersdorf began soon to operate limekilns to mass produce said quicklime. What is known as the Chemiewerk Rüdersdorf today had its origins in the year 1900, when the C.O. Wegener Company built its first cement factory which produced cement using its ultra-modern rotary kilns.

During the years of Nazi terror, Nazis immediately took over control of the factory and over 2000 forced laborer’s had to work in the lime quarries and cement works, as did Italian, French and Soviet prisoners of war (who were held in a concentration camp nearby). The Cement factory continued producing cement until 1944, when it switched over to producing synthetic bauxite. Bauxite is used to create Aluminum and the German war industry was hungry for it. The majority of the buildings that are left standing today trace their origins back to that construction phase.

After the war Rüdersdorf capitulated to the Soviets. While the forced laborer’s and foreign prisoners of war were liberated – the Soviets erected a new Prisoner of war camp in May 1945 on the grounds of the cement factory. The Soviet Camp had a camp within the camp reserved for high ranking Nazis, Concentration Camp Commanders and personnel.
Because of its state-of-the-art technical equipment, the alumina plant immediately became the focus of the Soviet occupation’s dismantling efforts. The factory was completely cleared out, even doors, windows and gutters were sent east. On 25 August 1949, the Soviet Military Administration (SMAD) issued Order 106 to reinstate the former plant with the aim of installing fertiliser production in the empty halls. A magnesium phosphate was produced from kola apatite and kieserite in the rotary kiln. In 1959, the annual production was 21000 t.

From 1972 onwards, the same technology was used to try to produce a calcium-sodium phosphate for industrial animal husbandry in the GDR, but this did not succeed satisfactorily because of the short rotary kilns. Therefore, major investments were made and two 100-metre rotary kilns were built at the Rüdersdorf branch of the VEB Chemiewerk Coswig, together with the equipment for waste gas purification, grinding and shipping, which was about 80% new.

The Chemiewerk Rüdersdorf began producing high quality feed phosphate under the brand name Rükana. The quality of Rükana was so good that the GDR used it to sell it abroad to western markets.
German reunification did not bring any good fortunes to the factory. The Rüdersdorf Chemical Factory did manage to continue production through the first years of German reunification but it was slow death. Rebranded as the Rüdersdorfer Futterphosphat GmbH, production capabilities and personnel were scaled down to such an extent that one could assume that the new owners and investors were deliberately running the company into the ground and by 1999, production was shot down. After all assets were sold off, all that remained were the empty production halls from the 1940s.

The ruins are today used as a film location for various film, big Hollywood as well as local German productions.

NATO STATION “IDGZ” [IT]

Exploration #110 NATO station IDGZ. We are in the middle of the Cold War. Everybody is spying. The NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) base, called in code “IDGZ”, was built for this very purpose at the Maniva, Dosso dei Galli. This station, which operated from 1969 to 1995, was connected in the north, in Troposcatter, to the German station of Feldberg by jumping with the Troposcatter signal over Switzerland, while in the south it was connected in microwave with the station of Monte Giogo.

The NATO station IDGZ was a central node in the chain of maximum security military radio communications between Europe and America. The signals also included 5 encrypted telephone channels used exclusively by the military leadership and the American President, called Hot Lines. The communication chain started from Turkey, the last bulwark of NATO placed in the espionage of the transmission of the former USSR and its satellite states, and passing through Greece, Italy, Germany, Norway, Greenland and Canada finally reached the United States. Almost all transmissions were carried out in Troposcatter signal, a transmission that used the troposphere as a vehicle for radio waves and avoided physical obstacles such as the Alps. This technology required the enormous Mickey Mouse ear antennas.

The base was built with thick reinforced concrete walls, was surrounded by barbed wire and was constantly watched over by soldiers and carabinieri from an armored garret on the roof. In addition, the military personnel of the Genio Trasmissioni were stationed on a flat time for the operation and maintenance of the equipment. During the winter months the station was isolated for a few weeks and supplies were carried out by Italian Army helicopters or snowcats. Technical note for the most engineers: the station was equipped with an innovative no-break system consisting of an electric motor-fly-dynamon which was constantly running and which would allow the operation of the electrical equipment for a few seconds (maximum 20 seconds) thus allowing the ignition of the powerful diesel alternators in case of power failure from the valley.

The end of the Cold War and the obsolescence of Troposcatter transmissions led to the closure of the base and the entire communication line. The base was emptied of all equipment by the military and then abandoned. Today it is now part of the panorama of the splendid valley and its “Mickey Mouse ears” antennas are still visible miles away.

SKRUNDA-1 [LV]

Exploration #71 Skrunda-1. Skrunda-1 is a special ghost town: during the period of activity it was a closed city and Soviet military base in Latvia. Skrunda-1 housed almost 5000 military, technicians and scientists (with related families) on duty at a radar station called in NATO slang “Hen House” (name deriving from the fact that it resembled a large chicken coop). It was one of the six radars built at the beginning of the Cold War in the peripheral areas of the then Soviet Union, capable of monitoring possible ballistic missile launches to Russia. The city was built in 1963 and had around 75 buildings spread over an area of more than 100 acres. The city was self-sufficient and inside there were schools, residences, a small hotel, a prison, places for leisure and bunkers.

The Russians left Latvia in 1994 but Skrunda-1 remained operational for a few more years. The city was finally emptied of all its valuable material and then abandoned by the Russians in 1998. The Latvians demolished the radar towers on the occasion of the exit of the Soviets, but the rest of the city was left abandoned in the middle of the forest.

In my urbex adventures I explored several ghost towns, but Skrunda-1 was a different experience. First of all, the vastness: we are not talking about a village but a real town with main roads and secondary avenues. Then the buildings: multi-storey apartment buildings, all the same in classic Soviet style that follow one after the other. Walking in these avenues was like experiencing the post-apocalyptic film scene. Inside, everything was devastated, but some small memories of the inhabitants remain, the ones that most impressed me, some small posters of some Russian teenagers who spent their childhood in Skrunda-1.

This exploration dates back to 2014. From 2016 it became an almost official tourist attraction and local authorities asked for an entrance ticket. Since 2018, however, the city has been under army control and is used for training and therefore unfortunately it can no longer be visited.

RED STAR TRAIN GRAVEYARD [HU]

Exploration #34 Red star train graveyard. The red star train graveyard place was once one of the most important railway repair workshops in Hungary. For the residents of Budapest this place goes by the name of Istvántelek and for the rest of the world, that name is Red Star Train Graveyard, the place where trains went to die.

The Istvántelek Train Yard, aka red star train graveyard, was built in Budapest between 1902 and 1905, going on to serve as a sprawling, modern repair facility for the city’s trains. In fact, one of the workshop halls was so large at 24,000 square meters that it was noted as Budapest’s largest building in 1902.

In this train graveyard it is possible to find some MAV class 301 locomotive that was the star of transportation from 1911 to 1914 and the huge and powerful MAV class 424 locomotive another engineering marvel that Hungary produced weighting an impressive 137 tons. The current collection of rusting gems includes also German freight cars that very well could have transported Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz during Nazi occupation.
More than 100 locomotives and railcars are here and around it in the fields rusting. The colossal locomotives were brought to this place to be repaired and transported to the Budapest Railway Museum but the museum does not have money for their restoration.