Why I’m Flying To Junkyards Around The World To Buy The Most Useless Part Of Any Car

When you travel to far-off lands, you want to learn about different cultures, eat new foods, see interesting sights, that sort of thing. All of which are worthy goals, but in the past year, I’ve taken a couple of international trips with the primary purpose of going to junkyards. And when you go to overseas junkyards, you need to bring back souvenirs; in my case, that means car badges not available in the United States.

This is the tale of my trip to the Black Sea coast and my quest for Soviet Empire car emblems. Because the writing style of the Murilee Martin Lifestyle Brand™ favors digressions and hyperlinks, you’ll be getting plenty of both here.

My first experience with overseas car graveyards came during the infamous “Donner Party” press trip for the Subaru Crosstrek Hybrid in Iceland in November of 2013.

I’d gone straight from judging at the 2013 Chubba Cheddar Enduro 24 Hours of Lemons race at Road America to O’Hare in Chicago and thence to Reykjavik, so I had both bribe booze and my sacred Lemons Supreme Court judicial robes with me.

Once I finished my task of helping to beat a couple of Crosstrek Hybrids half to death, I learned from one of our Icelandic guides that Reykjavik has a few junkyards. After being handed a bottle of Lemons Supreme Court bribe Malört, he agreed to drive me, Jason Kavanagh and Jonny Lieberman to those Icelando-boneyards. These proved to be stocked with mostly late-model-ish Detroit and Western European cars, used examples of which are imported cheaply by canny Icelandic car shoppers according to which side of the Atlantic has the best exchange rates and/or shipping prices at the moment. It’s hard to picture a proud descendant of Hallveig Fróðadóttir choosing to drive a Chrysler Cloud Car, but that very thing appears to have happened based on this sighting of a used-up Dodge Stratus.

I also found a genuine Lada Niva, which would seem to be perfectly suited for Icelandic conditions. Naturally, I was very tempted by a Perkins diesel-powered UAZ-452 Bukhanka that was for sale at a nearby used-car lot for $1000 (but foolishly did not buy it). I also didn’t buy any car badges at the junkyards, for reasons I’ll soon explain.

My appetite for junked Scandinavian metal thus whetted, I ventured to northern Sweden the following summer. They’ve got incredible junkyards there, and I could have bought dozens of not-available-in-America badges.

For example, this nicely weathered Datsun Cherry (aka Datsun F-10) badge.

Or this one from a Bedford Blitz.

Instead, this battered Opel Rekord badge (which the yard proprietor refused to charge anything for) was the only one I brought back from Sweden. Why is that?

I’ve Done This Before

For that, we’ll need to go back to 1984, when I went off to college and bought a Utah-built 1969 RoadRunner travel trailer to live in at the University of California, Irvine on-campus RV park. For interior decoration, my mom sewed me some curtains out of Hawaiian shirt fabric, and I applied my entire junkyard emblem collection on a cupboard door.

Yeah, film photography was hard back then (I got better at it later on), but you get the idea. As it turned out, it’s not a good idea to mount car badges on a vertical surface in a living space this small; I spent years covered with cuts and scrapes from brushing against them. Finally, I traded them for a couple of effects pedals for my late-1980s industrial noise band (except for the Pontiac 326 displacement badge at upper right in this photo, which I saved because it had been on a junkyard Tempest fender I bought for my $113 GTO; I still have it).

Naturally, I was a regular visitor to the junkyards of Santa Fe Springs, Wilmington, and Sun Valley during my time in Orange County, shopping for parts for my Competition Orange 1968 Mercury Cyclone, my British Racing Green 1973 MGB-GT and my primer gray 1965 Chevrolet Impala. I could have pocketed thousands of car emblems during this time (as I did with Fasten Seat Belt lights) but I decided to just collect early-1970s Impala door-panel badges. For reasons that must have made sense at the time, I made a firm decision that I wasn’t going to be one of those car guys— for it had become clear that I was going to be a hopeless car geek for the rest of my life— who covered every possible surface of my house and garage with car emblems and license plates.

But then the Covid-19 pandemic struck early in 2020 and automotive press events got more or less shut down. That meant that Autoblog (then operated by some puzzling Verizon/Yahoo!/AOL entity) lost a big slice of its regular car-industry content. I’d been writing one junkyard article per week for the site, and that got bumped up to four junkyard posts per week there (sadly, everyone there got canned last summer due to a hedge-fund takeover). I was hitting the boneyards several times per week to shoot interesting discarded machinery for Autoblog’s now-insatiable appetite for Junkyard Treasure posts, and I figured I might as well drop my self-imposed restrictions on plastering the inside of my garage with car badges and license plates.

It began harmlessly enough, with just the inside of the small garage door getting decorated with dozens of 2006-2009 GM “Mark of Excellence” (that is, “Mark of Impending Bankruptcy”) fender badges. But it’s easy to gather many, many badges when you’re making a dozen junkyard visits every month for years, and the collection spread across and then off the door in a hurry. Meanwhile, Lemons racers had been giving me badges for years, assuming I’d like them. By the way, I shot this photograph with a 1940 Afga Speedex film camera loaded with weird Agfa document-copying film, as one does.

You know how these things go. The badge infestation spread out from that corner of the garage and began overwhelming everything.

Even the area around the famous Turbo II Junkyard Boogaloo Boombox and affiliated audio gear got covered. I began gluing car emblems to amplifiers and monitors. I even upgraded the Junkyard Boogaloo box with the FUEL INJECTION badge from a 1978 Beetle.

Then my friend and fellow Denver automotive journalist/junkyard enthusiast, Andrew Ganz, discovered that Dallas-based Copart operates a pair of American-style self-service wrecking yards in the United Kingdom. One of those U-Pull-Its is in York, England; the other is in Edinburgh, Scotland.

We found cheap plane tickets to Heathrow, rented a cheap Mercedes-Benz A-Class, and we headed up to Yorkshire. U-Pull-It requires customers to wear “hi-vis” safety vests, so I brought along one I was issued for covering the Pikes Peak hillclimb.

We photographed dozens of interesting not-available-in-the-USA vehicles at the York U-Pull-It, then visited numerous other traditional breaker’s yards around the Leeds area (while blasting The Who’s 1970 proto-punk “Live at Leeds” album at top volume in the Benz, of course).

The world’s biggest Rolls-Royce/Bentley scrapyard is located in that region, on the former site of the factory at which the torpedo bomber that crippled the Bismarck was built. There’s a lot of history in the junkyard, if you know where to look!

Naturally, we enjoyed the local delicacies during our Yorkshire junkyard adventure, e.g., fish & chips with mushy peas.

We made sure to sample the excellent English beers at Brew York and other venues. Food and drink are very important components of international junkyard tourism.

Yes, the scrapyards of Yorkshire (and Northern England in general) are well worth visiting.

As it turned out, many English scrapyard employees are willing to trade badges and license plates for American license plates. We brought a big stack of plates (mostly from Colorado and Texas) and I think the only thing in my haul that I had to pay cash for was the 2008 International Van of the Year emblem that I pulled off a Citroën Jumpy (and that was just £3). Note the 2005 MG ZT clock in the upper left of the above photo; that precision VDO-made timepiece will be installed in a junkyard boombox soon.

Some of my Britain-obtained junkyard badges went in the garage wall location once occupied by an NOS Jeep Tornado valve cover (which will be moved to a better spot).

Some others went on the side of a garage LP shelf, joining the badges from a JDM Toyota Cresta Exceed that ended up in a Denver car graveyard plus a genuine 2009 Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club Mardis Gras krewe medallion that I found hanging from a mirror in a car at the New Orleans Pull-a-Part last year. Clearly, I needed more international car emblems!

Istanbul, Not Constantinople

The English junkyard trip went so well that we began planning the next one right away, this time including our French car-journo friend, Ronan Glon. We wanted to go to a region that would have pre-1989 Soviet Empire cars (plus glorious Cold War-era monuments) and eventually settled on the Black Sea regions of Bulgaria and Romania.

The main reason for this choice of region was that Turkish Airlines flies direct from Denver to Istanbul, and it’s a very short flight from there to the ancient Bulgarian city of Varna (which itself is just down the Black Sea coast from junkyard-heavy regions of Romania). Also, we spent months perusing Google Maps photos and reviews of the junkyards of the region and they looked very promising.

Arriving in mid-November, we rented a Renault Mégane sedan with six-on-the-floor manual transmission for about $25/day and began scouring eastern Bulgaria for businesses that might offer pre-fall-of-the-USSR vehicles and/or parts made by the likes of VAZ, GAZ, ZAZ, UAZ, ZiL, LuAZ, KiAZ, Škoda, FSO, Trabant, EMW, AZLK, Dacia, Wartburg, Barkas and all the rest. Yes, that’s a bent Hummer H2 with Texas registration stickers at a Varna automotive business.

We had dozens of likely locations bookmarked and set out on a whirlwind several days of visiting as many as possible.

Bulgaria is a fascinating place, with a history going back to the very earliest days of human civilization. The Soviet era left the strongest mark on the architecture around Varna, with endless Brezhnev-era concrete apartment buildings everywhere.

We learned early on that in Bulgaria there’s something of a continuum that has straight-up used car lots at one end and pure “auto-morgues” (автоморги) at the other, with many shades in between. This one had a Trabant as a sign but mostly Mercedes-Benz W124s and MkII Volkswagen Golfs in its inventory.

This place had a genuine East Germany-built Wartburg 353 in stock but it was unclear whether it was a parts car or a “buy here finance here” affordable driver.

Despite all the “We Buy Your Junk Cars” billboards around Varna, we were batting .000 on finding good boneyards or even used parts within the city limits.

The thrift stores were packed with cool stuff like this Bulgarian typewriter (a typist from another Cyrillic-using region might have trouble using this BDS-layout keyboard), but I never saw any car parts in any of them.

I wish I had known more about Eastern Bloc bootleg cassette culture of the late 1980s and early 1990s when I saw these tapes at a thrift store. I’d have bought some just for their historical significance.

Visiting the Monument to the Bulgarian-Soviet Friendship in Varna made our desire to see car graveyards packed with Warsaw Pact iron even stronger.

Nearly all of the Warsaw Pact-era cars we spotted on the streets of Bulgaria were members of the extended VAZ-2101 Lada family.

These Fiat 124-related cars are well-suited to Bulgarian road conditions and are easy to repair with simple tools.

Surely there must be a junkyard specializing in Ladas somewhere in town!

Here’s a Lada survivor that Google Street View shows using this same Varna parking spot since 2012.

There are even some Lada Samaras still extant (the Finland-market Samara TV commercials are the best of the bunch, in my opinion).

We did manage to find a numbers-matching AZLK Aleko 2141 (a member of the Moskvitch family) parked next to some repair shops. The L in AZLK stands for Lenin, of course.

Here’s a stripped GAZ-53 truck (or maybe its Perkins diesel-powered Bulgarian counterpart, the Madara 400) sitting on rocks and chunks of wood.

Did you know that the VAZ-2123 Niva Travel was sold with Chevrolet badges during the GM-AvtoVAZ period? Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and… Putin-era Russian mini-SUVs!

We didn’t see any Trabants that looked like they might still be drivers… except for this Trabant-based beach buggy at a Black Sea coastal resort.

November is the off-season for Black Sea resorts, but we enjoyed a trip to a cold and blustery beach where, presumably, the Trabant Beach Buggy drives guests around.

We drove inland to a more rural region and spotted a maybe-still-running example of the “people’s car” of the Soviet Union: a Ukraine-built ZAZ-968M Zaporozhets. The political poster in the foreground is for hard-right politician Konstantin Kostadinov of the Revival Party.

Maybe this Trabant had moved under its own power in recent memory (but I doubt it).

There are memorials featuring steely-eyed heroic soldiers in many Bulgarian towns, though some of them appear to be commemorating the 1912-1913 Balkan Wars rather than World War II (in which Bulgaria was on the losing side).

It’s worth visiting this part of the world just for the war memorials.

Not to mention apocalyptic Cold War military hardware, such as this S-2 Sopka cruise missile, based on the MiG-15 fighter.

Or a MiG-17 two-seater.

Finally, we began finding genuine автоморги, or at least businesses that sold used parts in addition to whole cars.

Most of them were stocked with pretty ordinary European or Asian cars from the past couple of decades. There was a bigger problem, though: most of the employees at these yards were quite suspicious of strangers, particularly foreign strangers.

It turns out that quite a few cars stolen in France and Germany end up in Bulgaria, and we got the impression that European Union lawmen must come sniffing around the auto-morgues and used-car lots looking to make busts. It seemed that the yard employees believed that we were seriously undercover German cops trying to look like two Americans and a Frenchman, pretending to want to buy a VAZ-2101 grille and maybe some badges… just prior to slapping on the cuffs as a helicopter swoops in to gather up the suspects.

One yard had a gratifyingly battered early Lada, and an employee was actually willing to sell us badges from it. He wanted 50 Bulgarian lev for this one, which meant a price tag of about $30. I wasn’t willing to pay that much, just as a matter of principle.

For the most part, driving in the region wasn’t too challenging. But there were some exceptions, such as this horse-drawn cart causing havoc on a major highway.

At long last, we drove up to a yard that seemed different. There was a 1960s Škoda 1000 MB with 1982 Bulgarian registration tags parked out front, for one thing.

Rather than giving us cold “you guys are obviously the fuzz, go away” stares and clamming up when we tried to communicate via English-to-Bulgarian translation apps, the folks at this family-owned yard encouraged us to poke around. I found a Lada 112 right off; sure, it was built at least a decade after the Cold War ended, but at least it was a real Lada at a yard that was willing to sell us stuff.

In fact, they were willing to sell me this gorgeous IZH 56 motorcycle, made by the same manufacturer that built Kalashnikov rifles during the 1950s, and the price tag was a very reasonable €2,000 (about $2,160). I didn’t have time to arrange for shipping home, so I passed… very reluctantly, because just look at it!

Way in the back of the yard, we hit pay dirt: a Trabant 601! The price for the decklid badge was a couple of lev, or about a buck (Ganz ended up with that one).

We requested the Lada 112 badges as well, and this guy pried them off for us.

Things were looking up!

Actually, that was the junkyard high point of the trip. The situation across the border in Romania was more of the same, with suspicious employees giving us— I mean, the “German ellroys” as far as they were concerned— the cold shoulder. At least there was this Trabant on a gas station roof.

There’s always something interesting to see on the streets of a new country, however, as long as you’re a car nerd.

Like this homemade Batmobile in Constanța, for example.

Back in Varna, we enjoyed excellent traditional Bulgarian food. This was one of the nicest restaurants in town, in a very historic building. Junkyard adventurers need proper nourishment!

Bulgaria is known for its wine, but there’s good local beer to be had as well.

We kept checking thrift shops and antique stores for car-related items, and I found this 1970s Bulgarian wind-up toy race car at one of them.

We thought we were going to have to take our stash of American license plates— brought along in order to trade with junkyard employees, as we’d done in England— back home with us. Then we stumbled across an amazing Varna antique store whose proprietor was willing to deal.

Mihail didn’t have any car badges in stock, but he did have Bulgarian street signs that he’d swap for our license plates.

I never knew my office needed a Bulgarian electrical-hazard warning sign until I got this one.

I turned a couple of Colorado plates into this Cold War-riffic Lenin bust as well. It now lives in my office next to the Karl Marx snowglobe I’d bought in Marx’s hometown a year earlier.

Then we all went to a nearby bar to celebrate our mutually rewarding negotiations (well, at least I hope Mihail was able to sell those American license plates for big lev) with many rounds of drinks. I give the Zeppelin Beer Bar my highest recommendation, in case you find yourself in Varna with a powerful thirst.

On the barstool next to me was Mao, the manager of the establishment.

As good a time as we were having on our trip, with all the great food, drink and Cold War architecture, we still hadn’t obtained any junkyard badges beyond the couple from the Trabant 601 and Lada 112. Time was running short and we had to get creative.

Then Ganz thought to search for just “Лада” (Lada) and this Varna auto-parts shop, APAPAT-93, popped up. We headed over immediately.

Out front was this tough-looking Lada Niva, which was a very good sign.

Just the car for muddy Balkan roads.

Inside, things looked fairly ordinary for a parts store.

Those head gaskets certainly look Lada-ish!

How about some Lada exhaust components?

APAPAT-93 offers non-Lada parts as well.

The owner seemed baffled by our translated-through-the-smartphone-app questions at first, and he seemed on the stern side. Then he became quite friendly once he figured out what we wanted and headed into the back storeroom.

He came back with some dusty baskets and boxes of NOS Lada emblems. Pay dirt!

He doled out a dozen or so of the badges, some still in factory packaging, and accepted a ludicrously small payment for them.

So here is my haul of Lada badges from the trip. I still haven’t mounted them on my garage wall, because these badges need a place of honor and I must clear space.

Where to for the next international junkyard trip? I’m thinking Spain.

All photos: Murilee Martin