Outside there are a number of costumes being aired in the sun. After that we visit the Historical Museum which the guard tells us was finished just before the system collapsed, so although there is a spacious building, perhaps, for our understanding of proportion, even over-dimensional for the size of the town, there are almost no funds available for running it or, for example, for translating the wall and exhibit texts that are only in Cyrillic. Lights are turned on for us, and turned off again immediately when we leave the vicinity of the display thus saving electricity. This is something we are to see again and again in different towns. I go to the toilet before we leave and discover a store room with a stack of old radios. Just round the corner is an open-air café with adventurous wiring and speaker holders.

On the road into town, just across from a high-rise housing estate, one block of which looks almost completely abandoned and in the process of decay, we investigate a building which turns out to be an open-air cinema. M tells us that many small towns—Bratzigovo has around 11,000 inhabitants—had almost identical facilities. He can remember seeing, back in the days when the government of India leaned heavily towards Moscow, Indian films on one of these concrete screens – Bollywood in Bulgaria. But none of that glamour is left, the filmic frisson has been buried under mounds of black VHS tape, the cool dataflow from DVDs and the new imperative of profitability patterns is based on individual consumption. Plant life has taken over from social life. For me the building is an architectural marker for radical socio-economic change. I’m certain there will be more of them and indeed we are only back in the car for a few minutes, on the road out of town and back to Plovdiv, when there is another empty building. Again we stop. This time it is a disused residential unit originally attached to a school. It housed pupils from the country who lived too far away to travel back and forth everyday, says M.