This run-down structure was once equipped as a small theatre that later doubled as a cinema. It also had rooms for other activities. I enter by the stage door and get my first view of the auditorium. Much of the seating is still there though some of it is heaped up in confusion, no longer sure which way it should be facing.

A grand piano at the back of the hall has collapsed to one side. It appears to be trying to bury itself in the cellar underneath. The brackets for holding the stage lighting still hang onto the walls tenaciously though the lights themselves are long gone. Moving from the auditorium to the entrance hall with its ticket office, I run into a table that looks as if the people round it had just left recently. The stack of newspapers though is from the late eighties. The cashier’s overall still hangs on a peg in an adjoining room. There is a ghostly plaque of Lenin on the wall. Downstairs in the cellar there are theatre flats – one with the two monks who created the Cyrillic alphabet. Upstairs from the entrance there are offices and an exhibition room, the final exhibition is still in place though it has suffered limited fire and rain damage. Up here there is also an entrance to the cinema balcony. Sporadic graffiti appears across some of the walls, the most conspicuous being what seems to be an invocation of Vasil Levski, a hero of the revolutionary nationalist movement in 19th-century Bulgaria. He set up a number of local revolutionary committees which continued to function even after he had been captured, tried and hanged by the Ottoman authorities some five years before Bulgaria regained its independence in the Russo-Turkish War.