Съборът в Радуил. За социалистическата трансформация на един религиозен празник
Parish Fair in Raduil. The Socialist Transformation of a Religious Feast

Summary/Abstract: After the establishment of one-party rule in the late 1940’s, the Bulgarian Communist Party started an aggressive campaign directed against religion and the church. Part of the Party’s atheist policy was to eliminate the religious feasts and practices of the people and to replace them with a whole set of new socialist holidays and customs, which were expected to contribute to the molding of the new “socialist personality”. In accordance with this official policy, the holiday of St. Mary’s Assumption (August, 15), celebrated as a parish fair (sabor) in the mountain village of Raduil, which is presented as an example, was turned into a secular Day of the cooperative Worker. It underwent a number of transformations, for example the abolition of the religious rituals and their replacement by “progressive” traditional elements considered adequate for the socialist order, the inclusion of new socialist elements, and the alteration of the entire feast’s meaning. The holiday was utilized for the shaping of the “new socialist man” but it was also instrumentalized for the self-presentation of the local elite. However, the changes were not accepted; instead, the intentions of the local authorities were countered by the unwillingness of the villagers to comply. In the course of time, they developed cultural strategies in order to reduce the discrepancies between the imposed model and their own needs, like giving preference to the private sphere and moving religious rituals from the public to the private arena. In the end, the holiday had turned into a conglomerate of socialist and traditional elements and established itself somewhere “in tile middle”, between the pressure “from above” and the reactions “from below”.

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