Page 575 [575]
Visualization of Policies of Cultural Memory Construction
one more version among the local population that relates the name of the village
to the period of Ottoman rule when, under the threat of conversion to Islam, the
local people were hiding in the woods above the village. For the most part, the
etymology of the toponyms was first introduced in 1915—1916 by the Bulgarian
historians Bogdan Filov, Yordan Ivanov, and Vasil Zlatarski, participants in the
scientific expedition in Macedonia and the Morava Valley organized by the general
staff of the Bulgarian Army in the course of the First World War‘ (Petrov 1993).
It is worth mentioning an important historical and demographic fact. In the
late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, a significant part of the population
of the villages in Podgorie was Muslim (Ethnographie 1878: 41-42). However,
in the course of the Balkan Wars and the First World War the majority of this
Muslim population migrated (mostly to the Ottoman Empire). As a matter of
fact, today’s population of the Podgorie’s villages is not native but is constituted of
descendants of migrants from the villages in the Ograzhden Mountains or from
Aegean Macedonia. Having all this in mind and taking into consideration the
fact that an entire period of 1,000 years separates us from the events related to
the Battle of Kleidion, it is hard to accept the idea of the existence of preserved
“authentic” cultural memory transmitted from generation to generation.
All this makes us see the cultural memory of King Samuel and the Battle of
Kleidion as a construct that, according to our (the authors’) hypothesis, is a result
of a series of cultural state policies which date back to the beginning of the twen¬
tieth century but whose culmination is in the period from the mid-1960s to the
1980s.
Policies of Cultural Memory Construction and Their Visualization: 1912-1944
With the emergence on the Balkan map in the nineteenth century of new national
states, the region of Petrich as part of the geographic area of Macedonia became
a scene of various political claims and a bone of contention among the Balkan
states. The ethnic origin of the population in the region was a subject of constant
disputes, which continued even after its incorporation into Bulgaria in 1912 (when
the region was liberated from Ottoman rule). In this context, Bulgaria aimed to
prove the contested Bulgarian ethnic origin of the population in the region and to
strengthen its Bulgarian national identity. Part of this strategy was the above-men¬
tioned project of the general staff of the Bulgarian Army to conduct a scientific ex¬
pedition in Macedonia and the Morava Valley during the course of the First World
War. We could assume that precisely the visit of B. Filov, V. Zlatarski, and Y. Ivanov
during the expedition marked the first stage of mass and purposeful subsequent
The expedition was a scientific and reconnaissance mission within the areas in Macedonia and the
Morava Valley conquered by the Bulgarian Army. Most probably, the aim of the general staff was to obtain
scientific data for the future peace negotiations and for proving Bulgarian claims regarding the western
Bulgarian ethnic border.
573