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Girdling the city centre is the broad sweep of Sofia's inner ring road , built in imitation of the wide boulevards of other European capitals such as Paris, Vienna and Budapest. There's little of architectural interest along its length, save for a scattering of monuments and buildings around the eastern end of pl. Aleksandar Nevski and bul. Tsar Osvoboditel. A hundred metres north of the Nevski church, at the intersection with Yanko Sakazov, stands the weathered stone Vasil Levski Monument ( Levski pametnik ), marking the spot where the "Apostle of Freedom" was hanged by the Ottoman authorities in 1873. From there it's a brief stroll south to Sofia University , the country's most prestigious educational establishment. Founded a decade after the Liberation, it was named after Kliment Ohridski, a pupil of saints Cyril and Methodius, who as ninth-century bishop of Ohrid in western Macedonia had an important impact on the flowering of Slav culture. Not previously known for their radicalism, Sofia's students were at the heart of demonstrations in June 1990 protesting at the alleged unfairness of Bulgaria's first post-Communist elections. Barricades went up in front of the university, provoking fears that Bulgaria's nascent democracy would descend into confrontation, but government concessions to the opposition prevented any real violence. Continuing along bul. Levski from the university, you reach the mausoleum of Knyaz Aleksandar Batenberg (Mon-Fri 9am-noon & 2-5pm), occupying a small park at the corner of ul. Slavyanska. Despite being deposed in 1886 and living in exile in Graz until his death in 1893, Bulgaria's first post-Liberation ruler always wanted to be buried in Sofia, and his successor Ferdinand obliged by having the mausoleum erected in his honour. It took so long to build, however, that Aleksandar's corpse spent five years in the Rotunda of St George before finally taking up residence here. A neo-Baroque cupola-topped structure holds his plain marble sarcophagus, draped with a Bulgarian flag, but other than a couple of military tunics, worn by the prince when visiting front-line troops in the Serb-Bulgarian war of 1885, there's little to see. Immediately opposite the mausoleum stands the towering Monument to the Soviet Army , erected in honour of the "liberation" of Bulgaria in 1944. Although allied to Nazi Germany during World War II, the Bulgarians always shrank from declaring war on the Soviet Union, mindful of the long tradition of Russo-Bulgarian friendship. The Soviets, however, regarded Bulgaria as ripe for conquest, and despite the Bulgarian government's readiness to change sides as the war neared its end, the Red Army invaded anyway. Centrepiece of the monument is a Red Army soldier flanked by a worker and a peasant woman with a child, an archetypal symbol of Bulgaro-Soviet friendship which used to feature in monuments and propaganda billboards throughout the land. Nowadays it serves as the backdrop to the antics of skateboarders, who practice manoeuvres on the flagstoned area between the monument and the main road to the north.
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