From practically anywhere in the center of the city of Shumen in eastern Bulgaria, a monument called the Founders of the Bulgarian State is impossible to miss under the glow of the summer afternoon sun. Its 171-foot-tall concrete bulk juts from a plateau above the city, piercing the sky over the Danubian Plain like a ship’s figurehead. Despite the monument’s intimidating contours and the fact that it was installed by the country’s repressive twentieth-century communist regime, it is beloved. Up on the plateau, kids lounge on the monument’s wide steps on a clear Saturday in July. A family from Shumen—they live in London now—has come to gawk at the enormous blocky-headed, heavy-shouldered statues of the titular founders, a collection of medieval Bulgarian khans and tsars. A few breathless visitors reach the plateau having braved 1,300 stairs from the city below in the stifling heat.
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