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A Letter from Dimitrovgrad

By: Aneta Vasileva

The post-war New Town in Bulgaria has just celebrated its 75th birthday. Its combination of Stalinist aesthetics and post-socialist kitsch is all that the country’s elites find shameful, but there is still life in this ‘city of the future’.

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An old man is talking into a microphone, standing in front of the wire fence of a children’s playground between decrepit prefab blocks amid lovely greenery. ‘On the 2nd of September was the birthday of our Dimitrovgrad,’ he says and starts singing: ‘The city we built, we built with love, the city of our youth.’ […]

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An old man is talking into a microphone, standing in front of the wire fence of a children’s playground between decrepit prefab blocks amid lovely greenery. ‘On the 2nd of September was the birthday of our Dimitrovgrad,’ he says and starts singing: ‘The city we built, we built with love, the city of our youth.’ […]

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An old man is talking into a microphone, standing in front of the wire fence of a children’s playground between decrepit prefab blocks amid lovely greenery. ‘On the 2nd of September was the birthday of our Dimitrovgrad,’ he says and starts singing: ‘The city we built, we built with love, the city of our youth.’ […]

An old man is talking into a microphone, standing in front of the wire fence of a children’s playground between decrepit prefab blocks amid lovely greenery. ‘On the 2nd of September was the birthday of our Dimitrovgrad,’ he says and starts singing: ‘The city we built, we built with love, the city of our youth.’ […]

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