Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena

Fellow Publications

Edited by Ana Luleva, Ivanka Petrova and Slavia Barlieva

Contested Heritage and Identities in Post-Socialist Bulgaria

Gutenberg Publishing House
ISBN 978-61-9176-045-9
Sofia 2015
390 pages

The authors of this collection are united around the concept of heritage as primarily a cultural construct that is created in the present and refers to the past. In this perspective, it is defined as a set of ways in which the selected material artifacts, natural objects, memories and traditions become cultural, political and economic resources to the present.
The collection of studies shows the diversity of topics relating heritage to identity in post-socialist Bulgaria. Some of them discuss this relationship through the prism of commemoration and memory transformations. Others focus on the transnational processes of “appropriating” heritage, the changes and transformations of the Bulgarian local folk. Two studies are devoted to the earlier period of the establishment of the Bulgarian cultural heritage.