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94 Valentina Vaseva The Other Dead—the Image of the “Immortal” Communist Leaders in Media Propaganda The visual presentation of death and the celebratory funeral ceremonies in honour of the dead have been widespread in Bulgarian urban culture ever since the nineteenth century, but this tradition established itself and became a social norm in the first half of the twentieth century. At that time, all printed media began publishing detailed descriptions of the funerals of famous figures including descriptions of the images of the dead themselves that captured the moment of death. Initially, only portraits of the deceased in a black sable frame were used as illustrative material. An exception here is the reburial (secondary burial) of the first Bulgarian prince Alexander Battenberg, elected after Bulgaria regained its independence from the Ottoman Empire, and the laying of his body in a mausoleum in 1898. The prince died on November 5, 1893, in Graz and his body was transferred to Bulgaria to be temporarily buried in the church of St. George in Sofia. Following a decision taken by the government after an architectural contest, held between 1895 and 1897, a mausoleum in which the prince was solemnly reburied was built (Stanchova 1991: 70; Tokin 2005: 20; Vaseva 2008: 89). On this occasion a few photographs of renowned photographer Dimitar A. Karastoyanov were published in the journal Llyustratsia svetlina (‘Illustration Light’), which was published between the 1890s and the 1930s. The journal published a large number of photographs that gave reliable information about the events and personalities of that time (Vetov 2015: 11). In the early twentieth century the main sources of information were newspapers, which also published notices of the death of important figures along with detailed descriptions of the funeral ceremonies. A standard visual presentation of memorial events gradually developed; some of the newspapers made a special vanshna zhaleyna forma (‘external mourning form’), the term of the period. The presentation included the following conventions: reports of death and obituaries were to be printed on the front page within a thick black frame with a cross displayed in front of the name of the deceased; in relation to the death, sometimes even painted or photographic portraits of the important figures were published. These are some of the rare cases of publication of human images, especially in the early twentieth century, when photography was still not popular because of the high costs involved. During the Balkan Wars, images of mourning processions and of the deceased laid in coffins of worship were starting to appear in the press. There are even many cases in which the entire front page is framed in black. This way of expressing grief was typical
