Haunting Images of the Past: WWII Monuments in Post-Communist Bulgaria (original) (raw)
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REVISITING THE COMMUNIST PAST: HISTORIOGRAPHY, POLITICS AND MEMORIALS IN BULGARIA AFTER 1989
Almost three decades after the fall of the communist regime (1989-2016) and ten years after the country’s accession to the EU (2007), Bulgarians still adopt contradictory stances in terms of their recent communist history and seem unable to be reconciled with it. This paper aims to show the manner in which the debate has been conducted through an examination of the following interrelated issues: the reassessment of the communist past and revision of the master narrative that contemporary historians have embarked on, the political developments, the fate of communist monuments and commemorative days, and the construction of anti-communist memorials.
A monument embodies a desire to preserve in time something as fragile as human memory, capturing it in solid material to fix it, so it can remain unchanged for posterity. A network of monuments to events and individuals from a nation’s historical past, especially when they go back to its origin, would serve then to establish a national identity, to anchor it in the present and claim its existence. But a nation’s historical past is only remembered according to particular interpretations usually serving political needs and this would apply even more to a communist regime that seeks to re-construct history in a way best serving its purposes to construct a new social order. The communist regime in Bulgaria produced in the period 1944 – 1989 an astonishing quantity of monuments commemorating individuals, historical events and ideals. These monuments were erected in all parts of the country to serve the established narration of the nation’s historical past and to guarantee its permanence and presence in everyday life. But the practice of constant reinvention of historical narrative is not unique to the Communist Party. After the fall of the regime a new identity and historical narrative were needed. This report addresses the way in which the monuments constructed in Bulgaria during the communist regime reveal a continuing process of rewriting history and argues that despite the intention for permanence, they are unstable and reflect the instability of what is considered historical truth or worthy of remembering. Five examples are explored in the context of the Bulgarian Communist Party politics on historiography, culture, and education, as well as contemporary debates on the legacy of the regime to outline not only how historical narrative was inscribed in monuments, but also how it can be distorted within shifts of political power and how these monuments perform their task today. By adding another dimension – the interaction between a monument and its visitors, the agency of the public is acknowledged in the process of evolution of their significance.
Death and the Desecrated: Monuments of the Socialist Past in Post-1989 Bulgaria
Anthropology of East Europe Review, 2003
individual articles in both the print and online version of the Anthropology of East Europe Review is retained by the individual authors. They reserve all rights other than those stated here. Please contact the managing editor for details on contacting these authors. Permission is granted for reproducing these articles for scholarly and classroom use as long as only the cost of reproduction is charged to the students. Commercial reproduction of these articles requires the permission of the authors. The end of socialism as state ideology touched deeply ingrained mechanisms of social expression and representation and, together with the changed attitude to the legacy of the socialist past, led to deep transformations in the notions of sacred places, ritual sites, death and the sacred. Monuments of the socialist epoch were among those sites of public memory, which bore most directly these shifts in representation, and their fate as destroyed, desecrated, neglected or fallen into oblivion presents an important episode in the history of the post-1989 period. The proper treatment and interpretation of the socialist monuments was a key public issue in all the countries of the Eastern Europe after 1989 and, with varying intensity, has remained important in the following years.
Tostões, Ana, and Koselj, Nataša, eds. Metamorphosis. The Continuity of Change. Lisboa: Docomomo International; Ljubljana: Docomomo Slovenia, 2018
In the summer of 2017 a socialist monument was destroyed in downtown Sofia amidst heated debates. It was built in 1981 to celebrate 1300 years of the foundation of Bulgarian state in line with the prevailing communist nationalist rhetoric at the time - a Bulgarian version of the phenomenon related to a late 1970s shift in the country’s cultural policies. The socialist monument is to be replaced by a war memorial - a reconstruction of a previously existing at the same place one, built in 1934, partly destroyed by WWII bombings of Sofia and later fully dismantled by the communist regime. That memorial was part of the Heimatkunst in pre-WWII Bulgaria, commemorating the fallen soldiers in the wars for the nation state in the 1910s. The “battle of the monuments” uncovered a realm of disturbing conflicts hidden behind the seemingly monolithic European identity of the ex-socialist country. Bulgaria still preserves the image of an optimistic and reliable EU member without far-right or far-left political excesses, with modest and balanced international behaviour. Yet two monuments managed to reveal a number of identity clashes: communism vs anti-communism, nationalism vs universalism, “left” vs “right” nationalism, modern architectural heritage vs tradition. That’s the reason why the debate on the destruction of one monument is actually a debate on the future of Modern Heritage in the country. And the clash of nationalisms is in fact a battle for the post-socialist identity of the Bulgarian city, taking place on the Modern Heritage battleground.
Areti ADAMOPOULOU, Anna Maria DROUMPOUKI (éd.), Monuments for World War II: Memory and Oblivion in the Balkans and Central-East Europe, Ioannina: University of Ioannina / Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation, 2024
This article focuses on one of the dominant narratives of contestation of the Monument to the Soviet Army (MSA) in Sofia since 1989 and the political and memorial strategies aimed at its disqualification. Calls for dismantling the monument have been an integral part of a rhetoric appropriating the concept of “liberation”, demanding that public space is “liberated” from the monument’s symbolically, politically and aesthetically burdensome presence. Concepts of cultural heritage have featured prominently in these debates, especially concerning the meaning of “monument”. Concentrating on an essential part of these debates –the “monumental” status of the MSA (according to the criteria of historical accuracy, memorial significance and aesthetic value)– we propose here a reflection on the way in which concepts of heritage can be instrumentalised in periods of political transition.
We focused our research on the first steps of the Russian state towards raising 303 gravestone-monuments immediately after the ROW in 1878. The history of the first Russian monuments devoted to the Russo-Ottoman War reveals the lack of any Bulgari-an tradition of memory culture in the first decades after the war. The first memorial places were imported from abroad, from the victorious Russian Empire, and were marked by the tradition of the Russian religious memory culture. Depending on the Bulgarian-Russian and later Bulgarian-Soviet relations the monuments changed their meaning and function being reinterpreted in accordance to the political situations. In theoretical memory studies, monument is considered as both collective creation of identity and affirmation of interpretation of history by consensus between the state and its citizens. Each monument is socially and politically motivated and objectifies social constellations. 1 It is a social symbol uniting a group or a nation making a collective memory visible and objective. Once created monuments immediately shape public space and projects long term consequences. The lack of monuments in a certain period of history speaks about identity crises and a related disintegration of the state or about a lack of tradition in objectifying the cultural memory of the nation. The period we researched is a transition period following the liberation of the young Bulgarian state from Ottoman rule in 1878. At the beginning the Bulgarian memory was not a state initiative […] There were two groups who used to fill up the memory emptiness in their own way. On one side the Russian army and the provisional Russian government as representatives of a foreign power and on the other side the collective patterns of history interpretation of the Bulgar-ian participants in the war and their veteran associations. Both impact-ed the beginning of the memory culture in Bulgaria. 2
Monuments for World War II: Memory and Oblivion in the Balkans and Central-East Europe
Monuments for World War II: Memory and Oblivion in the Balkans and Central-East Europe, 2024
This volume contains the edited papers presented at the International Conference “Monuments for World War II: Memory and Oblivion in the Balkans and Central-East Europe” held at the B. & M. Theocharakis Foundation for Fine Arts and Music in Athens on 23-24 November 2023. The conference and this publication are a partial fulfilment of the obligations arising from the research project “WaRs: War and Resistance Monuments in Greece: Documentation of and Historical Approach to Public Monuments, 1945-today”, carried out at the University of Ioannina, Greece, by Areti Adamopoulou (leader), Alexandros Teneketzis, Anna Maria Droumpouki, Kostas Korres and Konstantinos Argianas. The research project “WaRs” was supported by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I.) under the “2nd Call for H.F.R.I. Research Projects to support Faculty Members & Researchers” (Project Number: 2961).
Contemporary Art and Socialist Heritage Debate in Post-Socialist Bulgaria
Nebojsa Camprag, Anshika Suri (Ed.), Conference proceedings: Three Decades of Post-Socialist Transition, 2019
Bulgarian debate on the presence in the public space of monuments from the socialist period had a slow start. After the political changes from November 1989, the major concern seemed to be the creation of new alternatives of political ruling of the country; the transformation of the urban space was not a priority. The falling of monuments of ideological figures happened without a public discussion and not in the heat of mass protests as it was the case of many countries in the former Eastern Bloc. When the real debate started in the summer of 1990, concerning the Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov and the Monuments of the Soviet Army, it was quickly eclipsed by more urging economic and social issues. The most consistent reaction was observed among museum professionals and contemporary artists. The first started a new reflection on their collections and exhibitions almost immediately after the Change. Contemporary artists, on the other side, were the quickest to interrogate the aesthetics of the public space and the presence of monuments referencing an ideology from the past. They have questioned, reexamined and appropriated several key socialist monuments or memory sites in their works, and it is the conflict of memories and aesthetics, as well as the need for reconciliation, that transpire from their art. This paper strives to reveal the important role contemporary art plays in the developing of the perception of socialist monuments as heritage in Bulgaria, as well as its part in the memory and aesthetics debate on public space. Through the case studies of the Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov (1949-1999) and the Monument 1300 Years Bulgaria in Sofia (1981-2017), we put an accent on the importance aesthetic arguments have on the preservation of socialist heritage today.
"Unity, Creativity, Beauty". Decline and Survival of Socialist Memorial Sites in Bulgaria
A Future for Our Recent Past. Model Projects of Modern Heritage Conservation in Europe. Berlin: Hendrik Bäβler Verlag, 202 (ICOMOS - Hefte des Deutschen Nationalkomitees LXXIII). [Eng], 2020
Late 1970s in socialist Bulgaria were a period when children were subjected to special interests, reaching far beyond the usual leftist child-oriented elements of the political ideology. Precisely this connection - to the always positive children’s theme, has saved the “Banner of Peace” monument in Sofia from being openly dissonant, unlike most of the other socialist monuments in Bulgaria. Nowadays, nobody defines this monument as “totalitarian”, despite all the facts in its history that link it to the regime no less than the others. As a result of various activities in the last five years, more people start to know and appreciate the place, which not only raises interest, but also intolerance to vandalism and paves the way to its successful reintegration. Ironically, the once silently received legal protection as cultural heritage more as a shield against the threat of destruction than as a real appreciation, is now a real tool for legitimacy and approval in the opinion of the general public.