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Of the buildings surrounding the Largo, the white, colonnaded supertanker of the Party House , or partiinyat dom , is by far the most arresting structure. Nowadays providing office space for members of the Sabranie (Bulgaria's parliament), it was originally built in the 1950s to accommodate the office of the Communist Party's Central Committee - and featured in a popular joke: A man cycles up to the building and leans his bike against it, whereupon a policeman shouts, "Hey! You can't leave that there, a high Soviet delegation is due to arrive any minute." "That's okay," replies the cyclist, "I'll chain it up". After November 1989, public pressure mounted to have the Communists evicted from the building: initially without much result. Anti-Communist demonstrations in August 1990 did, however, succeed in getting rid of the enormous red star traditionally perched above the roof. Despite a decree from the National Assembly ordering the removal of Communist iconography from all public buildings, the red star atop the Party House was initially left untouched. On August 26 the building was torched by an angry mob. The party was finally ejected in early 1992, after which the Party House served briefly as a cinema before assuming its current function. Immediately in front of the Party House, another pedestrian subway contains substantial remnants of the Istochna Porta - the eastern gate of the Roman city of Serdica. Now surrounded by huge chunks of concrete, the bulging defensive towers which once stood guard on each side of the gate are still visible, different courses of brickwork pointing to later Byzantine and medieval Bulgarian rebuildings.
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