OCR
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 twentieth 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-mentioned project of the general staff of the Bulgarian Army to conduct a scientific expedition 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