The National Palace for Culture in Sofia looks like a huge sports arena and sits at the terminus (or source) of a quarter-mile long watercourse that is the width of two highway lanes. The watercourse is defunct and is now a long stretch of cracked and crumbling concrete and marble.

The Palace is eight stories high with three stories underground; it houses thirteen halls and has 161,500 square feet of exhibition space. It is an amazing place, built in an octagonal shape, filled floor to ceiling with marvelous modernist motifs.

In Vancouver, I have often discussed—usually after too many glasses of wine at an opening in a soon to be demolished cultural facility—what it would be like if people valued art as much as sports. I then try to imagine BC Place Stadium housing art, dance and theatre. I realized as I stood in the National Palace of Culture that this is what that would look like.

Later, when we told our Bulgarian friend about our visit to the Palace, she smiled ruefully, shook her head, and said, “it’s a ghost.” She told us that the Palace was commissioned by Lyudmila Zhivkova, the daughter of the leader of the Bulgarian Communist Party, Todor Zhivkov, a pro-Soviet hard liner. Zhivkova was an art historian who loved Bulgarian culture. She championed Bulgarian artists and her overt promotion of Bulgarian culture was definitely anti-Soviet, but she managed to get away with it—or did she?

Zhivkova did not live to see the opening of the Palace; she died before it was finished. Our friend tells us Zhivkova died mysteriously, “like Marilyn Monroe.” Zhivkova’s Wikipedia entry says that she died of brain cancer. It also says she was a prominent cultural advocate, but that her regime had no lasting impact. In Sofia, a city surrounded by monuments to men for all kinds of questionable achievements, I found this statement enraging—no lasting impact. If we were to evaluate impact based on the sheer mass of a monument then, Zhivkova would win hands down.