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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 relationship 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 & Gilliam 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 culture that would meet the planned goals of the Communist Party. The focus of historical research also changed. The dominant topic for Bulgarian 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 Asparuh 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
