The Red Flat in Sofia, Bulgaria may be the closest you can get to time travel. Upon visit, a guide will encourage you to treat the flat as if it were your own. Put on the slippers, help yourself to the wardrobe, go through the drawers, and even smoke the 40-year-old cigarettes.
An audio guide is also provided to deepen your understanding of the time and point out details. Visitors have plenty of time both to listen to the audio guide and explore on their own.
The flat experience is run by an award-winning group of local tour guides known as Free Tour Sofia. There is remarkably little information about the Soviet era in Sofia, largely due to highly contested opinions about the period. Tourists expressed great interest in the period to the Free Tour Sofia guides. So, they conducted extensive primary research to create the first history of the USSR occupation—often by loosening an ex-official’s lips via long drinking sessions. When the chance came to preserve an abandoned flat that had been left just how it was in the mid-1980s, the guides jumped at the chance.Â
The apartment was bought along with all of its contents after the death of the elderly owner. The space has remained exactly as it was in the 1980s, allowing you to play house in a perfectly preserved Soviet-era flat. Every detail of the home is preserved: the soap in the bathroom, the books, the records, the toys, the pickles, the bedding, the heating system, and the decor are all from the period.
