Read on Twitter
in a pandemic that hits lungs, a story about the Balkans' biggest lung disease sanitorium, in Raduntsi, Bulgaria. Also a story of a hospital that survived WW2 and many other things, but not post-socialism and the market shock. Photos through an FB friend, & a sad one that hit me.
The story starts in 1935 when Tsar Boris III initiated a search for a sanitarium to treat TB. The Higher Medical Council searched for 20 months, before settling on an area in the Balkan mountain range, to the south of Tryavna. The construction started in 1939.
Due to WW2, the project was halted & continued after, officially opened on the 1st November 1955. It was designed by one of Bulgaria's first women architects, Victoria Angelova-Vinarova, who had studied in Vienna and Dresden. Always smoking, she ironically died of a lung illness.
It treated Bulgarians and others alike, with a peak capacity of 700 people. It had a library, cinema, theater stage, classrooms and many amenities, as patients were sent here for months-long rehabilitation programs - they could take courses, read, play.
After socialism, it remained a state hospital for a while, before becoming more and more indebted after 2000. The last patients were discharged in July 2013, after the electricity was cut off. By 2015 it was liquidated. Its large base and equipment was left to rot.
If someone buys it, it will probably end up as a hotel. Never mind that in times like these a specialized lung hospital looks like a very pressing thing. Some pics of its current state, which make it seem like people packed up overnight just before a zombie invasion,
Not really trying to make a big point here. Just some sadness, combined with a love for abandoned places. The party is everywhere too...
The hospital's Soviet tractor-snowplow. Also the dining rooms for the doctors.
Operation room (Keep Quiet! Operation in Progress! Nurse on Duty!) Stephen King-like corridors. Abandoned kitchens.
Old classrooms. Old sci-fi next to the beds. Nurses' footwear.
A hospital that had been modern at one time, but never restructured or reformed after the 'reforms'. So its 'outmodedness' became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
'Health workers, always improve the healing process of the patients!', a sentiment indeed. And a quote by Pavlov - 'Remember science demands a person's who life! And even if you had two, they wouldn't be enough!'
An end.
