It is flanked by a tower that looks as if it could be 250 feet high and is decorated with a red star at the top. B says it would shine in the sunlight and rumours had it that its constructors had used natural rubies. All that remains of the myth is some red paint and shards of red glass underfoot…

The way up to the monument is by a broad stone staircase which is sprouting tufts of grass that are being flattened at the moment by rain and wind. As we approach it becomes clear that some of the inscriptions on the outside are incomplete and that post-communist scribbles cover much of the surface to an arm’s length above the ground. Having been repulsed by the chained door, we walk around to the tower. B says she can vaguely remember being inside on a school outing.

Ancient ruins often have a fixed and honoured place in the construction of national identity and are functionally employed to demonstrate a historical continuity even if that is in the negative: we are still here even if the Romans have come and gone. Bulgaria is well-endowed with ruins of this kind – Thracian burial mounds with gold artefacts or Roman ruins themselves, for example. The ruins I refer to here, however, are generally dangerous places, not only because of their threat to physical safety. Their physical volatility is mirrored in their position as indicators set at one end of the scale of societal change – the other being the new skyscraper headquarters, holiday complex, shopping mall, high-rise monolith. They represent architectural goads to reconsider the past and they persist in generating disturbing reflections about the nature of the trajectory into the future. They are the rubbish of history, discarded, disowned or defeated traditions which haunt us in the form of speculation about our here and now.

In the past ruins fulfilled many functions of a practical nature such as providing building materials for present needs—Raphael wrote a letter to Pope Leo X complaining of the latter’s use of marble statuary from classical times to produce lime for cement in his extensive architectural projects. Sometimes, as in the case of the Coliseum up till the beginning of the 19th century, they provided architectural shelter and support for makeshift business premises and sites of social exchange.

In the visual arts of the 15th and 16th centuries representing ruins provided an allegorical platform on which socio-political commentary might be performed. This, according to Makarius, ‘signals the moment when artists stopped claiming that they were only imitating nature according to the Aristotelian principles of mimesis and confessed to the pleasures of image-making’. At the same time, where ruins have been integrated into a landscape picture and are, in themselves, accurately depicted, he detects a ‘documentary’ thrust.