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490 Lilia Uzlowa of visual and textual narratives" (Kürti 2006: 47). 1hey gather in one territory and cultural model, connected in time and space with the social group and identities, which they are intended for. This thesis is a wonderful complement to Kiirti’s view that they reflect “a multitude of parallel worlds existing together with us in the common environment” (2006: 47). Here should be added another advantage of the postcard: it transfers and preserves a visual snapshot of the other reality, limited only by the physical destruction of the so-called “hard copy’. The thematic variety of the motifs simultaneously links the individual or the group with the territory, subjects the identities to the momentary feeling and specifies the efforts to relate elements of the lifestyle with the contemporaneity of the community. Through the postcard, an attempt is made to unite phenomena and realities around one temporal axis. Whether the relations between the contents of the message and the illustration could be explained in that way, more precisely, is a question, that cannot be answered with one general formula or statement. The notions of “time”, “history”, and “space” are functions of the reality and are configured according to the tastes of the users. The latter define the subjective space between the experience, identifying themselves with everything that is close and familiar, and the striving to learn about the distant and the unknown. Illustrative evidence of the last statement is found in the analysis of postcards sent by East German tourists during their holidays in Bulgaria (Fig. 9).'° They see and experience the “institutional” south not as casual “institutional” south. It can be “seen” in the texts of the postcards: heat, sun, wild men, beautiful girls, endless beaches, lots of fruits and vegetables and so forth.”” The Bulgarian socialist resort reality is visualized by the motifs of the colour photographs. This is reflected in the thesis of Ruth Phillips, claiming that the postcard is in essence a tourist’s disposable merchandise but also a marker of the tourist experience (2006). We can add that the messages and the “greetings” of the addressers are shared personal observations and impressions from events and a characteristic of the “authentic” social otherness, in which they exist in at the moment (Fig. 1)."? The meeting between locals and non-locals: “The study of any visual art tradition is limited by the nature of the object record that survived through extant example, graphic or photographic depiction, and verbal description ... Cultural evolutionism was neither a fix nor a homogeneous discourse” (Phillips 2006: 431, 437; Orth 2003: 6'”). It happens in another national cultural model. What is peculiar—is that the socialist reality is not ‘© Postcard no. 6, July 7,1982. The texts are translated and added at the end of the article. 18 Postcard no. 79, August 4, 1972. 5 Orth, E. W. "... Kultur ist doch ein Korrelatbegriff demjenigen des Menschen”.
