The Bells — a communist token of freedom
When I was little, my mother used to sing the English version of the famous lullaby Frère Jacques, which ended with „morning bells are ringing, morning bells are ringing/ ding dang dong”. As I walked to the Bells Monument (Kambanite Park) in Sofia, this verse was going through my head — are you humming it now, too? But believe me, if the Bells had rung for Jacques, he definitely wouldn’t have missed morning prayer.
The Bells Monument is situated just outside Sofia and has been there since 1979, when the builders placed a capsule in the monument’s foundation containing children’s wishes to future generations. The capsule says: “Children of the future accept the eternal, fiery call of immortality — Unity, Creativity, Beauty”. 30 days and 30 nights later, the huge construction had been erected, all 37 meters of Communist-style-concrete-bulk of it. The structure is composed of 4 pylons which are carved in the middle, thus forming an empty sphere that represents the Earth. Hanging in that cavity are 7 bells, each of which symbolises one of the world’s continents. The woman who suggested the monument’s construction, Lyudmilla Zhivkova, a rather controversial daughter of former Communist leader Todor Zhivkov, was a respected patron of the arts who eventually established the monument with support from UNESCO. The symbology of it all is wonderful, but the construction itself didn’t really please my eye.
If you’ve already read about this in our chronicle on the road, then you know that the weather was rather hostile when we got to the Bells. The experience felt kind of like the beginning of a thriller story — the foggy mist over Sofia with the wind whooshing and the bells banging, blasts of air striking our cold faces — ergo my perception of the whole thing might be a bit…affected. I had a somewhat uneasy feeling approaching the construction, and seeing something built in what seemed like a different era gave me the chills (OK, maybe it was the wind, but there was definitely something else as well).
As we were the only ones brave enough to visit the monument on that cold Sunday morning, we felt like the forest’s silence could do with being a little disturbed by the ringing of the bells. Not the big ones, evidently! However, many of Bulgaria’s expat children have made their contributions to the monument over the years by donating specific bells. These are exhibited around the main construction, and range from tiny little bells, to huge opulent ones. Among the gargantuan ones are, of course, Bulgaria’s and Romania’s bells. It’s like a who’s who of bells — the bigger the bell, the better the country. So we rang a few of them, thus contributing to the thriller-story vibe I was talking about.
There we were, five people in an apparently secluded area outside of Sofia, colossal bells sending their wails among the willowy trees, and the wind practically slapping our faces. Weird as this may sound, it felt liberating. I knew that we were so much freer than the children whom Kambanite was built for. But, regardless of the deep Communist feeling pervading the whole monument, we stood by what it stood for — Unity, Creativity, Beauty.
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