When you travel through Bulgaria you will most likely be stunned by the sheer number of ugly "heroic" monuments dotting the countryside. They all depict more or less one and the same thing: Soviet soldiers holding submachine guns, local peasants wearing raincoats and flat caps, busty women usually carrying a bunch of wheat stables. Stars, hammers and sickles – the symbols of Communism – are omnipresent, and so are plaques celebrating local partizani, or Second World War Communist resistance fighters. Coupled with the general dereliction and dilapidation of the place you might think you are in Albania of Enver Xoxha rather than Bulgaria of Boyko Borisov.

Yet you know that Communism has all but disappeared from this part of the world 20 years ago, and you might have perhaps been told that the system it created was responsible for killing proportionately more Bulgarians than perished in the Soviet gulag. Are there any monuments to them, you will sooner or later ask yourself.

To understand why pro-Communist statues and monuments in Bulgaria of the European Union and NATO by far outnumber the monuments commemorating Communism's victims is difficult unless you knew at least some of the background. The killings of opponents of the Soviet system started as early as 9 September 1944, the very day the Communists seized power in Bulgaria. Nobody knows how many Bulgarians lost their lives in the first weeks of the "people's democracy," their only crime being their political opinion or their social position. However, the number of victims of the so-called People's Court, which was created to give legitimacy to the murder of politicians, artists, writers and even physicians considered "dangerous" to the new regime, is well documented.

From December 1944 to April 1945 the court issued 9,550 verdicts, with 2,680 death sentences and 1,921 life terms. To understand why the Bulgarian Communists were a lot more cruel than anyone else in Europe at the time one needs to go no further than the numbers: the Nuremberg Trials against top Nazis issued just 17 death sentences. The victims of the People's Court are just a fraction of the number of Bulgarians who suffered various forms of repression during Communism. Between 1944 and 1989 thousands of opponents of the regime were detained, interned or denied education or work advancement. The reasons for the repression were many and varied: accusations ‒ usually bogus ‒ of espionage and plotting against the Communist state, or opposing the forced collectivisation of agricultural land, or disagreeing with the Bulgarianisation policies toward the country's Muslims. Telling political jokes, wearing mini-skirts, having a "bourgeois" past or the "wrong" relatives could all land you in a labour camp. So could listening to Elvis Presley music. The total number of those repressed between 1944 and 1990 is estimated at about 300,000.

But while it was the official policy of the Communist state to erect monuments to its own heroes and events in order to create a kind of history that would, supposedly, live on forever, after Communism collapsed very few people had the money or energy to erect statues or other public signs commemorating Communism's victims.

Sadly, the monuments erected to their memory after the collapse of Communism are few and usually very humble. Bulgaria is still the only former East bloc country to have no museum to the victims of the regime. When in 2002 the so-called alternative Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Church canonised about 120 priests killed after 1944, the officially recognised Holy Synod, still run by former cadres of the Communist-era State Security, objected to the canonisation as "uncanonical".

There is a virtual monument to the victims of Communism, however, at www.victimsofcommunism.bg, with an English version. Now, for the first time, Vagabond brings a comprehensive selection of anti- Communist Monuments from Belene to Nova Zagora and from the banks of the Danube at Vidin to Sofia's Central Cemetery.