Communist Party HQ

I am reliably informed that this used to be the Communist Party HQ in Gabrovo, Bulgaria. Nowadays it is either a court, the district prosecutor's office or perhaps both.

We walked from the hotel to our conference venue this morning, which turned out to be in the low building to the left of the old Communist Party HQ. The conference I was attending was on culture and the creative industries and their economic impact. I was speaking this morning and was also on a discussion panel taking questions from the floor of the conference.

It seems to me that this building is in keeping with the stereotypical view of the kind of buildings that used to be constructed in the Eastern European countries during the second half of the 20th century when they were part of the Soviet bloc, although there are similar looking buildings in Western Europe as well!

There are quite a few of this style of building in Gabrovo, but there are also a number of older traditional buildings in central Gabrovo, which are much nicer. Some of them look like buildings you would see in Austria, Germany or many other Central European countries, but some are clearly very local in design and were built in the 19th century or perhaps a little earlier.