This is the Lukoil Refinery near Burgas, on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast. It is one of the largest petrochemical refineries in Southeast Europe, capable of processing up to seven million tonnes a year. I think it’s also kind of beautiful.
Bulgaria used to be proud of places like this. In 1966 the Bulgarian Tourist Union created a campaign called the ‘100 Tourist Sites of Bulgaria.’ It was a way for Bulgarians to get to know their country better and it promoted all the most important cultural and historical places. Visitors were given a booklet which they could get stamped at each site. There were prizes (like bicycles and camping gear) for anyone who could get 25, 50 or 100 stamps in their book.
Included on that 1966 list were numerous industrial sites – such as the Kremikovtzi Metallurgic Plant near Sofia, the Kurdzhali Lead and Zinc Plant, and this refinery at Burgas too.
In 2003 the Bulgarian Tourist Union updated the list. Their new ‘100 Tourist Sites’ got rid of all places associated with the Bulgarian Communist Party, which had previously included political monuments, museums (like the Sofia Museum of the Bulgarian-Soviet Friendship), and various house-museums at the birthplaces of famous communist leaders and politicians. These were generally replaced with more churches, monasteries, caves, and so on (of which Bulgaria basically has an unlimited number). They also decided to strike all the industrial sites like this off the tourism list.
Honestly, I think that’s a real shame.
One of the best school trips I can remember involved a tour of a local factory. It’s fascinating to see where things come from, and how they’re made. I think it’s healthy too. We increasingly live these disconnected, consumerist lives where it becomes easier to replace something than to fix it. We are seeing an alarming rise in the planned obsolescence of commercial products, things like smartphones that are designed to encourage replacements over repairs (and this is why I think web resources like iFixit are so important). I have heard stories from teacher friends about city children who don’t understand where their food comes from before it appears on supermarket shelves. I don’t believe it does society any favours in the long-run to sequester production behind a curtain of ignorance.
You can imagine Bulgarian school children in the 1960s, and 1970s, visiting places like this refinery and just being amazed by that view. It looks like something out of Blade Runner. Maybe they were a little bit proud too, to think, We built this!
Of course, there is also something potentially quite Marxist about this – celebrating the moving cogs in the machine, making a monument of the means of production, etc. Case in point, one of the few places I have visited that really puts factory tours front and centre in its tourism offering is North Korea. But actually it needn’t be so political.
As a child, I dismantled every toy I owned in order to find out how they worked (and maybe half those times I managed to successfully reassemble them again). I think that kind of curiosity is good. And I think people should be encouraged to find factories interesting, regardless of their politics. When I’m designing tours I try to include places of production (factories, mines, power plants, breweries) as often as I can.
Last year, the Kremikovtzi Metallurgic Plant, one of the former ‘100 Tourist Sites of Bulgaria,’ played a starring role in the Bulgarian film In the Heart of the Machine. In this context the plant appears as the hellish setting for a dystopian thriller. I visited Kremikovtzi a couple of years ago – there isn’t much to see anymore, the site was largely dismantled beginning in the 1990s and sold off to foreign oligarchs for scrap value. The remaining plot covers a massive area from the administrative blocks near the highway, through what is now largely just a rubble-strewn plain, all the way to the abandoned housing blocks behind, nestled into the hills, where workers were accommodated.
Modern Bulgarian cinema may remember Kremikovtzi as a place of terror – but once, school children gazed at that city-sized factory in awe and got their booklets stamped to say they’d been there.
Of course the heritage is complicated, of course the subject has been politicised, and no, not everyone working in the Kremikovtzi plant was likely there of their own free will. That’s the history and you can’t change it… but rather than hiding or demolishing it, these important conversations can instead become part of the learning experience. I think there’s also huge social value in permitting people to feel that childish wonder, the authentic excitement at seeing an extraordinary machine in motion, and then showing them how it works.
By now I have been to maybe half of the places on the new 100 Tourist Sites of Bulgaria list, and I’ve got to tell you, at this point I am sick to the back teeth of Roman ruins and monasteries. Give me a great big sci-fi refinery any day.