A concrete saucer and a 70 m tower stand on a levelled peak at 1,432 m. Seventy thousand tonnes of concrete, forty thousand of steel, three thousand of gilded glass, six thousand workers, fourteen million leva — finished 1981, sealed 1989.

Inside: 937 m² of Byzantine small-tessera mosaic, cobalt-heavy, gold at the centre. Outside: two ruby glass stars twelve metres across. Roughly a fifth of the tesserae are already gone. This system takes the building in its honest state — spalled, streaked, still monumental.