Trapped: Bulgarian Monumentality, Memory, and Emotion

Abstract

Bulgaria’s monuments from the late nineteenth century to the end of socialism have become lightning rods of public opinion and physical manifestations of collective memory that drive national emotions. Unevenly preserving memories of liberation and oppression, these sites of memory unequally intensify nostalgia, taga, and yad across the population, and in doing so leave the country trapped in both space and time. Monuments to the Russian fight against Ottoman oppression are preserved through state funding and venerated with floral tributes from grateful citizens. Socialist monuments live a different reality; left to rot and be recontextualized by artists and vandals. The monumental landscape therefore reflects the contrasting narratives of a nineteenth century myth of utopian freedom that never existed as well as dissatisfaction in the failed promises of a proletarian paradise. The latter, as overt symbols of totalitarian domination have led to artists recasting the sculptures as resistance pieces not only to the communist past but the present resurgence of an aggressive Russia. With Putin’s Russia adopting many of the maleficent policies of the USSR, graffiti has drawn parallels between the past and present to make statements against contemporary oppression. However, socialist monuments are also critiques of the present Western democratic system and visible symbol of national psychomachia. Alongside the messages that celebrate the fall of communism are critiques of the capitalism system that has, like those which promised utopia before, failed to produce the dreamland that it prophesized. Generating yad, taga, and nostalgia the monuments perpetuate dreams of returning to a golden age of freedom yet has not washed away the blood of communist crimes and with the continued failures of capitalism Bulgaria is trapped, East of the West and post-historical but not yet part of the future.