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The Image of the Religious Other Through the Eyes of Bulgarian Cartoonists (1960s—1970s)
lished cartoons occasionally. The largest number of publications was between 1964
and 1967 and the lowest, after 1968.
The works that prevailed were those of Stoyan Venev, Tsvetan Tsekov-Karan¬
dash, Tenju Pindarev, Boris Dimovsky, and Ljubo Marinov. Individual works were
occasionally created by other artists: Georgi Chaushov, Georgi Anastasov, Georgi
Chavdarov, Boris Mengishev, Kiril Majsky, Todor Dinovy, Panayot Gelev, and others.
The largest number of artists were born from 1921 to 1930 and 1931 to 1940 (75%
in total), and the smallest number were born from 1901 to 1910 and from 1911 to
1920 (25% in total). At the same time, the oldest generation created the main por¬
tion of the cartoons (35.6%). Two-thirds of the cartoonists came from big cities and
small towns, and one-third came from villages. One cartoonist was of Turkish origin.
The main subjects of the cartoons were the Orthodox denomination and the
Bulgarian Orthodox Church (BOCh). The cartoons rarely had Catholics and Mus¬
lims as subjects. Other religious groups like Protestants, Armenians, and Jews and
the New Religious Movements (including the White Brotherhood), were com¬
pletely absent. Perhaps this was owing to several reasons: according to the Commu¬
nist Party perceptions, Catholicism and Islam were “enemies of the government”;
in the Cold War the Vatican was a part of the so-called Western camp, and finally,
in the 1960s the government started an offensive against the religious identity of
Muslims in the country. Despite it’s small size (15,000 believers), the Protestant
community was also repressed at that time but did not become an object of car¬
toons (Central State Archive coll. 165: inventory 11, archival unit 748a, f. 1).
‘The cartoons presented the Orthodox clergy completely negatively. It should
be noted that in the 1960s and 1970s, Bulgarian artists deliberately followed the
iconography of their predecestors before the Second World War. They depicted
the Orthodox priests as elderly, ill-dressed, repulsive, and grotesque. This fueled an
already strong negative stereotype, created in the 1870s by Bulgarian writers and
further developed later on by Bulgarian literary classics, drama, and cinema.” This
stereotype was skillfully used by the atheistic propaganda in the 1950s and was
adopted by the cartoonists in the 1960s and 1970s.
The Orthodox clergy was depicted as primarily sinful, bearing almost all “mor¬
tal sins”: greed, lust, and gluttony. The main emphasis was put on its propensity for
drunkenness but priests were also shown as thieves and traitors (Figs 1 and 2). After
the launch of the first artificial Earth satellite (1958) and especially after Yuri Gaga¬
rin’s first flight in space (1961), another permanent feature of clergy, backwardness
as regarded the achievements of science and technology, was highlighted (Fig. 3).
" Before 1944, this negative image was launched in the works of Christo Botev, Elin Pelin, and Iliya
Volen. In the 1950s it was interpreted in several movies— Tajnata vecherya na Sedmatsite (‘The Last Supper
of the Sedmaks’) (1957), Siromashka radost (‘Pauper’s Joy’) (1958), and so forth—and in the theater—
Chichovtsi (‘Uncles’) (Satirical Theatre, 1960). See Dushkova 2004.
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