Photos

This husk of a building stands on the way up to St. Kliment's Monastary. It is pretty typical of the Soviet-built buildings in the area: a plain box with little or no attention paid to aesthetic detail.

Apparently, this structure was damaged in the Second World War. You can still see the pock marks from shrapnel, rubble at the building's foot, and scorch marks above the window on the right (though that could well have been more recent).

I found it amazing that there is still the occassional mess left from the great seige some sixty-five years ago. Standing in front of this building, which is just around the bend from the 8th-century monastery, reinforced for me that, in this little corner of the world, one can still touch centuries and centuries of history.