Sanctity and Modern Times
Sanctity and Modern Times

Summary/Abstract: The search for what is “Bulgarian” is specifically situated in political, scholarly, educational, journalistic, everyday, etc. discourses but, generally speaking, gravitates around such key conceptions like “history”, “past”, “origin”, “language”, and “religion”. Scholarly discourse or, to be more precise the humanities, have a special role, as they “soak in” the resonance of a given phenomenon in the rest of the spheres of discourse and provide society with knowledge, which may be instrumental in surmounting social collisions. In the present-day interpretation of the Christian religious belonging of the Bulgarians, the question of sanctitis also a marker of the Bulgarian identity. A new element in its situation within the present-day Bulgarian socio-cultural context is the beatification on March 15, 1998, in Rome of Monseignor Evgeni Bosilkov, the Bishop of Nikopol, who was murdered in Sofia Prison in 1952. This was the first Bulgarian Catholic and the first martyr of the faith, in what used to be the Eastern European Bloc during the Cold War, to be beatified by the Vatican, as well as the first prominent personality of our most modern history, with the halo of sanctity. The significance of the act of beatification gives rise to a series of questions, which have prompted the present study…

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