Sunday Afternoon In Radomir

There are abandoned playgrounds all over Radomir, though it is not a childless town. When I visited on a Sunday afternoon, there were a few children out riding bicycles and a few others walking with their parents, but most, as I could tell from the noise coming from the apartment buildings, were inside, trying to escape the oppressive July heat. Not that there was anything inviting about the playgrounds. The swing sets had no swings. The climbing frames were rusted and warped. The slides were broken. And most of the playgrounds weren’t in the shade.Like Pernik, Radomir is a depressed factory town about an hour by train outside Sofia whose glory days coincided with the height of Communism. Unlike Pernik, which has modern cafes, clothes stores and GSM outlets in its centre and is beginning to find new life as an exurb of Sofia, Radomir seems trapped in its moment. The large artificial lake in the park had been drained and was now covered in weeds; it’s hard to imagine it ever being filled up again. Almost all the factories were wrecked and bare, as if they’d suffered a war. Many were reduced to large empty shells. Parts of one had been reduced to piles of bricks.People live here. Almost every house had a small, lively garden in its front yard and chickens were walking in and out of the street. Quite a few adults were spending the afternoon fixing cars in garages and others were drinking beer in the shade in front of old-style cafes.A half-built hospital, which began construction 10 years ago, loomed on a hill over Radomir; it’s probably the city’s largest structure. Almost all the bricks had been laid, glass had been placed in some of the windows and some piping had been installed. But the plaster hadn’t been put up, and the surrounding area, all overgrown with long grass and weeds, was untouched. When I asked a mechanic who lived across the street from the construction site if he knew when the hospital would be completed, he said, “In this city, nothing is ever finished.”