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Representations of the Medieval Past in Socialist Bulgaria successful Bulgarian rulers being Khan Krum (800-814). In 864 under Prince Boris I (852-889) Bulgaria was Christianized and adopted the Slavonic alphabet. The greatest territorial expansion of the First Bulgarian Kingdom was achieved by Tsar Simeon (893-927). Under his successors a political decline followed and Bulgarian lands were conquered by Byzantium in the second decade of the eleventh century. After two centuries of Byzantine rule the Asen dynasty (the brothers Asen, Petar, Kaloyan) restored the Bulgarian state in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century. The Second Bulgarian Kingdom reached its political heyday under Tsar Yoan Asen II (1218-1241). In the late fourteenth century during the Shishman dynasty, Bulgarian lands fell to Ottoman control. After 1944, the Marxist medievalists were given the task “to abandon the bourgeois view of the role of historical figures”, and the focus of research was redirected to Slavic history and archeology (Kossev et al. 1972: 7, 22). In 1948, the First National Meeting of Historians made the decision to discard the “falsification”, “chauvinist layeres” and concepts of “bourgeois historians” (Elenkov 2008: 166). ‘The presented programme paper stressed that the Slavs had taken a leading role in the formation of the Bulgarian state in 681. At the meeting, Tsar Simeon (893— 927), who seemed ideal for state ruler in the interwar period, was declared the first Bulgarian ruler who led wars of conquest, while his predecessors were given merit for having led wars for the unification of the Slavs within the Bulgarian state. Positive evaluation was given to the rulers of Asen’s dynasty, who restored the Bulgarian state, and in this sense their objectives coincided with the interests of the Bulgarian people (Mutafchieva et al. 1995: 244, 248, 252). The Fifth Congress of the Bulgarian Communist Party in 1948 set the task of a “scientific” rewriting of history, which resulted in the publishing of two academic volumes storia na Balgaria (“History of Bulgaria) in 1954 and 1955. They were subsequently revised and edited in the 1960s (1961, 1962, 1964), expanding to three volumes (Elenkov 2008: 371-372). Earlier in 1951, however, Kratka istoria na balgarskia narod (A Brief History of the Bulgarian People’) (Mitev 1951) had been published, in which the Middle Ages were paid significantly less attention than the subsequent historical periods. The ninth and tenth centuries development period of the Bulgarian state were characterized by the formation of a feudal system, a process facilitated by Christianization and the wars of Tsar Simeon (Ibid.: 36). A particular emphasis in the presentation of the Middle Ages in The Brief History of the Bulgarian People was placed on a heretical religious movement, Bogomilism, viewed in the Marxist perspective of people’s resistance against feudalism. In the academic History of Bulgaria from 1954 (Milchev et al. 1954) the Middle Ages as a whole were presented within the paradigm of the socioeconomic formations and, in particular, of feudalism, with an emphasis on the class conflict in medieval society. The revised edition of History of Bulgaria from 1961 (Milchev et al. 1961) followed the same scheme and largely repeated the text from the previous edition. 557
