by Nikolai Vukov, Luca Ponchiroli
Through the streets of Bulgaria we almost inevitably come across monuments, sculptures, images dating back to the years of communist regime. Ideological propaganda tools created to proclaim the glory of a new social order and shaping a collective memory destined to last forever. At the fall of the regime the existence of these structures was inevitably called into question: many were demolished, others transformed to make them compatible with the new political situation.
The question was always the same: to delete the past remains or not? In many cases just empty pedestals remain today, while in others these monuments continue to decorate streets and squares of the country, testimonies of the most controversial period of modern Bulgarian history. This book aim is to offer a selection of commemorative monuments that can still be visited in Bulgaria. The pictures – totally original – go with a detailed archive analysis, useful to better understand the “monumental strategies” of the regime and to identify the geographical distribution of the “stone witnesses” to which this book is dedicated.
This book is in Italian and comes with English parallel text.
