Witnesses of Stone.Monuments & Architectures of the Red Bulgaria 1944 - 1989

Walking through towns and villages of Bulgaria you will certainly find monuments, sculptures, and images belonging to the period of communist rule. They were built to show the power of the new political order, by celebrating iconic figures and important events for the party. Through them, the regime sought to create a collective memory that would last forever. After the end of the communist rule in 1989, the existence of these peculiar representations was inevitably questioned. Many of the monuments were torn down, others were substituted or reshaped in order to cope with the new political realities. In the public agenda of the post- communist period, a key question was how to conceal or not to conceal the visual remains of a past that most Bulgarians wished to forget. In many cases, the remains of those monuments are little more than empty pedestals or traces that might bring relevance only to a curious and well prepared eye. Finally, some of them continued to decorate the country as visual witnesses of this most controversial period in modern Bulgarian history. The current book will present the reader with a comprehensive variety of monuments of the communist era, that can still be seen in Bulgaria nowadays.