Buzludzha

Short answer: The Monument House of the Bulgarian Communist Party stands on Buzludzha Peak in the Balkan Mountains (Stara Planina) of central Bulgaria, near the Shipka Pass. Bulgaria's communist government built it to commemorate an 1891 meeting nearby.

There, socialists led by Dimitar Blagoev founded the party that became the Bulgarian Social Democratic Party, a forerunner of the Bulgarian Communist Party. Architect Georgi Stoilov designed it. Construction began on January 23, 1974, after the summit was leveled with explosives, lowering it from 1,441 m to 1,432 m. Party leader Todor Zhivkov opened it on August 23, 1981. The building is a circular, saucer-shaped hall of concrete, steel and glass beside a 70 m tower set with red-glass stars. Inside, about 937 m² of mosaics depicted the party's history and figures such as Marx and Lenin. Maintenance stopped after communism ended in 1989, and the building was stripped and left open to the weather, so part of the mosaic art has been lost. Wikipedia notes that earlier rescue proposals were mostly political and tied to the Bulgarian Socialist Party. In 2018, Europa Nostra listed it among Europe's seven most endangered heritage sites. The Buzludzha Project Foundation, founded in 2015 by architect Dora Ivanova, received a Getty Foundation grant in 2019 for a conservation management plan. A second grant in 2020 paid for emergency stabilization of the mosaics. The foundation describes the building today as a symbol of conflict between people with different views of the past. The footage shows the frost-covered peak, the saucer roof and the tower's red star at sunrise.

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