Founders of the Bulgarian State Monument

A monument on the plateau above Shumen, unveiled in 1981 for the 1300th anniversary of the founding of the Bulgarian state. It was created by the sculptors Krum Damyanov and Ivan Slavov and the architects Georgi Gechev and Blagoy Atanasov. Instead of the usual statue there is a concrete composition of massive tilted slabs with passages laid between them: you walk along a corridor, and to left and right the figures of khans and tsars open up - Asparuh, Tervel, Krum, Simeon. The scale is deliberately overwhelming, individual blocks rise to thirty metres, and the lion at the top weighs around a thousand tonnes. The inner walls are faced with mosaics of smalt and ceramic covering hundreds of square metres in total, with runic and Cyrillic lettering. A stairway of 1300 steps leads up from the town, but you can also drive up by road. The monument is visible from the highway tens of kilometres away and remains one of the most coherent examples of late socialist monumentalism in the Balkans.

Address

Shumen

On the map