Кета Мирчева

The findings presented here are results of a more general research of the “geography” of Svoboda/Nezavisimost Newspaper (1869–1874). The texts under analysis were not only written, but they were also published on the pages of a periodical. Nevertheless these texts are in close relation to the sphere of imagining and the imagined. The topic of imagined texts is more or less inspired by the thesis about the nation as an imagined community. So the problem of the imagined geography calls for a discussion on the way in which certain texts perform an important function in the process of imagining the community, in our case – imagining the Bulgarian nation.

Eight years after his death in Bucharest (1867), the bones of the Bulgarian national revolutionary Georgi С. Rakovski were carried to Sofia the capital of the young Bulgarian Principality. Started as a private Initiative of the Volunteer's association in Rousse the event grew into a national hero's commemoration. The commemoration ceremonies include the Prince, ministers, MPs, the army, municipal authorities, craft organizations, teachers, and pupils. Despite the attempts of the ruling Liberal Party and their political opponents to use the event for narrow party goals, no one calls into question the need to pay tribute to the hero. The article tracks how this event contributes to the invention of a nationalistic public tradition and the creation of a new patriotic discourse in the process of nation-building.

The article presents how the accusation that Jews use the blood of Christian children in their rituals, a legend most popular as “blood libel”, was discussed in the Plovdiv Bulgarian press in the late 19th century. There are cases of the legend being challenged by local journalists, as well as others in which they are its distributors. In this sense, the Bulgarians are no more tolerant than their Greek neighbors, as the director of the local AIU school claims in one of his reports. Some groups in Bulgarian society also succumb to anti-Semitism, and this depends as much on the entry of modern political anti-Semitic ideas through the channels of mass education and popular literature, as well as on economic problems and crises.

The review looks at the Bulgarian translation of an important book on the history of the town of Plovdiv in the 19th century – “The Revival Plovdiv: Transformation, Ideology, Nationalism” by Andreas Lyberatos (Greek edition appeared in 2009: “Economy, Politics and National Ideology: The Formation of the National Parties in Plovdiv in the 19th century”, University of Crete Press). Analyzing the deep economic, demographic and social transformations the city and the surrounding province underwent during the Tanzimat period, the author managed to successfully go beyond the limitations of the Bulgarian and Greek historical narratives and to show how the association with one or other national party within the unstable political, and social climate was not predetermined by belonging to one or another culture, but rather the opposite: a choice that went hesitantly and slowly and was associated with social and economic ties, with declines in political influence and positions won by each party, with danger and predictions of who would prevail in the conflict.