Паметници, „паметни места", „места на памет"
Monuments, "Memorable Sites," "Sites of Memory"

Summary/Abstract: Taking grounds in Pierre Nora's notion about lieux de memoire as activating memory through spatial signs and forms, the current article pays attention to monuments and memorial sites that were built after 1944 in Bulgaria, and analyses their role in shaping the public memory during the socialist period. Among the numerous sources available for approaching such a topic, the article chooses to concentrate especially on tourist guidebooks about towns and regions in Bulgaria and about tourist marches "along heroes' paths" that existed in those times. The article traces diverse aspects of monuments and memorial sites as lieu de memoire — their role in construing systems of commemorative references; their relationship to ideological narratives on paying tribute to the fallen; their capacity to provide new dimensions to death spots; their usage as resources for carrying out a link between commemoration and tourism, etc. All these aspects testify to the influence that these lieu de memoire exercised upon the space of populated places and natural landscapes: they actively enter into it and rearrange it, create a network of symbolic emphases and sustain them into the focus of public attention. Presenting a particular realm of public and political memory in Bulgaria after 1944, the article outlines the process of creating "collective remembrance" through spatial markers, and the imagining of both populated and natural landscapes as imbued with ideological visions of memory.

• Details
• Contents