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Valentina Vaseva
documents are among the important reasons such innovations as the cinemato¬
graph were used to construct the "image of death". In 1915, at the funeral of
Exarch Joseph I, for the first time in Bulgaria footage from the removal of a body
by the court of the Holy Synod and the funeral procession to the St. Kral church,
where the funeral service was held, was captured by a cinematographer (Vaseva
2006: 106; Constant 1991: 340; Utro [Morning], issue 1587, June 27, 1915).
By the 1920s, photography had permanently entered the life of Bulgarians, es¬
pecially in cities, and photographic images began to occupy an increasingly impor¬
tant place in the visual presentation of funeral events, not only in the pages of the
newspapers, which mainly documented the funerals of important figures, but also
in the everyday life of ordinary Bulgarians who could afford to hire a photographer.
At that time, images of funerals at which relatives are posing with the coffin and the
deceased gained popularity. These group portraits were broadcast in villages and
small towns and quickly entered the life of Bulgarians, even as a part of the funeral
ritual itself. Such “mournful images” are evidence of the complex nature of pho¬
tography and its significance in the process of converting verbal images into visual
ones—funeral photos were the last attempt to save portraits of deceased members
of the family so that the person could remain “known” (Gadjeva 2016).
After the establishment of the communist regime in Bulgaria, the existing urban
traditions of building a bright image of the “other dead”,' deceased individuals who
had made special contributions to society, were being used as communist propa¬
ganda for political, moral, and aesthetic suggestions. The death of the first political
leaders in the communist countries became an occasion to construct the image of
the “immortal leader of the people”. This concept, originally created in the Soviet
Union after the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, was later adopted in Bulgaria
after the death of Georgi Dimitrov, who was buried in a similar fashion. This image
of propaganda had its verbal expression in the form of text in the printed media,
where the portrait of the late leader was described in words, whereas posthumous
photographs and documentary footage of the funeral ceremonies preserved a visual
image. Thus, in the mass consciousness of “ordinary” people, the image of the
“other dead” is constructed with the help of printed and visual media, and they
become the extraordinary, the “immortals”, who are being used as an example for
the next generations. The practice of using such images and ideas of the “immortal
leader”, however, collapsed after the fall of communist regime in Eastern Europe.
The chapter is based on analysis of photographs published in the press and
documentary footage from the socialist period that relate to the death and burials
of political leaders. In the centre of the study, there is a visual representation of the
' This chapter discerns two categories of dead—the “regular ones”, any person after their passing, and the
drugite martvi (‘the other dead’), extraordinary persons who had made great contributions to society. The
“other dead” referred to in the text are great politicians, persons of power, and tsars from the presocialism
period. Later on during the socialism period after WWII, the term “other dead” shifts to the high-ranking
leaders of the communist parties like Georgi Dimitrov in Bulgaria and Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union.