Sunday, March 16, 2014
Palladian (Omni Shoreham)
With the fall of Communism in 1989, Bulgaria faced the task of constructing a new national identity distinguishable from both its Ottoman past and five decades of Communist rule. Cultural heritage has been crucial for the attainment of this goal due to its potent ability to continuously transmit a dominant nationalist narrative and identity to the public and to encourage the internalization of the cultural information inscribed therein. Monuments such as the Buyak Mosque cum National Archaeological Museum or the Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov that represent the Ottoman and Communist pasts have been reappropriated or destroyed in efforts to establish a Bulgarian identity tied to the National Revival period of the 19th century that preceded a brief national sovereignty and the Second Bulgarian Empire and its associated Golden Age of the 13th century. This paper illustrates how cultural heritage is instrumentalized in Bulgaria not only as a means to affirm and communicate national identity, but also to play into a post-Communist political agenda that projects the country within a European historical trajectory and aligns it with the European present.
