Under Communism, there was hardly a place in Bulgaria without a monument to Lenin, or at least a street, a school, or a kindergarten named after him. Sofia, the capital, had a tall statue of him in front of the Largo, where the main institutions of the People's Republic of Bulgaria were situated.

Portraits of Lenin hung in every school and were paraded at mass rallies. Students used to study "Leninism," a particular take on Marxism considered to be the only "correct" ideological view of the theories of Marx and Engels. It was Lenin who said that, before reaching the utopia of Communism, society should first go through Socialism, and who stipulated that the road to the coveted "dictatorship of the proletariat" is paved with a violent revolution.

Lenin was venerated across Bulgaria as the perfect poster man for Communism. Even when the personality cult of Stalin began to crack, in the mid-1950s, that of Lenin survived intact.

Lenin began to disappear from public spaces in Bulgaria soon after the democratic changes of 1989. Unlike monuments of partisans and the Soviet Army, there was little debate whether Lenin's effigies should be removed or demolished, and the streets, schools and so on were promptly renamed. In the process, a significant number of monuments and statues were lost forever, particularly those of bronze, which were sold for scrap metal.

Some of Lenin's images, however, survived, preserved by private collectors, galleries and municipalities. The best way to see many of them – from the monument that stood on the Largo until 1991 to desktop Lenins to paintings and other visual propaganda featuring him – is to visit the Museum of Socialist Art in Sofia.

The other is to undertake a trip around Bulgaria that will take you to places which, with one exception, you would otherwise never visit.

Novgrad

The village of Novgrad, near Svishtov in northern Bulgaria, is proud to be the only place in the country that has kept its official, larger-than-life Lenin intact. The bronze statue in the village centre is not particularly good, but as Novgrad lacks any other claim to fame, the locals love it. Rumours that the owners of the land on which the monument stands plan to sell it appear regularly, but so far have turned out to be unfounded.

Banya

The people of Novgrad are not exactly correct in their claim for uniqueness. the village of Banya near Bansko, in the southwest, has a statue of Lenin together with Georgi Dimitrov, Bulgaria's first Communist dictator. The people of Banya love their monument as their brethren in Novgrad do, and have an interesting story about it. The double statue was commissioned by a local man who emigrated to the United States in 1912. In the 1960s he donated a significant amount of money to his native Banya that, according to his wish, should be spent on a new a community centre and… the aforementioned monument of Lenin and Dimitrov. Did Lenin and Dimitrov know each other? It is highly improbable, but Dimitrov did attend the second congress of the Comintern in 1920. He could have met Lenin there. According to local mythology, the two knew each other well enough for Dimitrov to be one of the men who carried Lenin's coffin, together with Stalin and Trotsky.

Diana Hunting Lodge near Tervel

In the 2000s, a couple from Tervel, in the northeast, had an ingenious idea: they purchased a former hunting lodge built to serve Communist dictator Todor Zhivkov, restored it sensibly and turned it into a boutique hotel. The building was reconstructed true to the original and is still furnished with Carpathian Baroque wooden furniture given as a gift by Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who used to frequent for hunting sprees.

Besides careful restoration of the villa, the owners turned the lodge's grounds into a safe space for Communist public monuments from all over the region. Many of these are busts to long forgotten Communist officials in the garden, but there is also a Lenin.

Nikolaevo

A metal bust of the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution is now gathering dust among rusting industrial junk in the yard of a factory, in the village of Nikolaevo near Kazanlak. Under Communism, the factory was, of course, named Lenin. The bust is the only thing that remains from these times.

Shumen

On Veliki Preslav Street, in central Shumen, in the garden of one of those better-quality apartment blocks built under Communism, stands a strange figure: A man in a cloth cap protectively embracing a boy and girl. The trio's eyes are fixed on what should be the bright Communist future. When Shumen's Lenin appeared is not clear. In a city famed for its visually stunning monument to the 1,300 years of the foundation of Bulgaria, smaller statues tend to go unnoticed.

The Shumen Lenin is also the only one bearing clear traces of vandalism.