Град и мемориални пространства (По материали от Пловдив)
The City and Its Memorial Sites (on Materials from Plovdiv)

Summary/Abstract: The current article is an attempt to approach the problem of city memory from the point of view of the monuments and memorial spaces existing in Plovdiv. The article encompasses the major monuments and memorial sites on the territory of Plovdiv and pays special focus on the monument of the Soviet army (“Alyosha”), to the Brotherly mound, and to several of the newly-built monuments after 1989. The major points addressed in the paper are related to the dynamics of monuments’ creation and functioning during the socialist period in Bulgaria, their fates and metamorphoses after 1989, the attitudes to the new monuments, etc. Special attention is paid to the integration of monuments and memorial sites to the rich cultural and historical memory of the city. Monuments and memorial sites help to outline major moments in the spatial dynamics of Plovdiv over the years and reveal various aspects of the city’s history and culture both in the socialist and post-socialist period. The political rituals and festive celebrations held around them, their role as places for recreation and enjoyment, their turning into focal points of political debates and actions after 1989 – all these demonstrate important sides of monuments’ presence in city life both in the socialist and post-socialist periods. Raising important issues about the changes in memorial sites and urban space over the last decades, the article sheds light on monuments’ role as a significant reference point in the social and individual work of memory, and as such follows a new line of research in urban ethnology nowadays.

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