Oldal 558 [558]
556
Evgenia Iroeva
Representations of the Medieval Past
in Socialist Bulgaria
The present study analyses the way in which socialist Bulgaria talked about the
medieval past—that is the socialist discourse on medieval history. The past is the
referential “other” in relation to the present and is not called “a foreign country”
(Lowenthal 2002) by coincidence. At the same time, every present has its relation¬
ship with the respective past defined in a new way, the notions of the past being
changed by motives that reflect current needs (Ibid.: 493). As a result, the national
history is always written from the perspective of the future (Nora 2005: 28), and
representations of the past are an expression and a source of power (Bond & Gil¬
liam 1994),
Bulgarian science and culture from the socialist period (1945-1989) developed
under the strict control of the Communist Party and its institutions. In the years
after 1944, the humanities and historical science, in particular, were undergoing
radical ideological rethinking in terms of the imposed Marxist-Leninist ideology.
This process affected the university and academic networks, the school system, and
cultural institutions. The late 1940 saw the reorganization of the Archaeological
and Ethnographic Institutes with museums at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
and the opening of the Institute for History (Kossev et al. 1972: 24). Control over
the cultural sphere was carried out by the Committee for Science, Art and Culture
(since 1963, the Committee for Culture and Art) (Elenkov 2008: 137-139, 198).
‘The institution had the main purpose of producing new, socialist science and cul¬
ture that would meet the planned goals of the Communist Party.
The focus of historical research also changed. The dominant topic for Bulgar¬
ian historians before the wars (1912-1918) had been the April Uprising against
the Turks in 1876, while in the interwar period their focus of attention fell on the
Middle Ages (Hranova 2011b: 199). Medieval Bulgaria was seen as an ideal for the
territorial unification of all lands inhabited by Bulgarians—a national ideal that
remained unfulfilled during the Balkan Wars and the First World War. Although
the focus of attention of historical research in the first years of communist rule was
directed mainly to the re-evaluation of the recent past with an emphasis on the
manifestations of the class struggle in modern Bulgarian history, the medieval past
was also under reconsideration.
Bulgarian Middle Ages covered the period from seventh to fourteenth century.
The medieval Bulgarian state was founded in 681 by the Bulgarians of Khan As¬
paruh and Slavic tribes in the region of the Lower Danube. Gradually the state
expanded to the south at the expense of Byzantine territories, one of the most