New Europe College Regional Program Yearbook 2001-2002

N.E.C. Yearbook 2001-2002
FIG. 3 – MONUMENT OF THE SOVIET ARMY IN SOFIA, 1954.
PHOTO: N. VUKOV, 2002.
erection – most of the monuments dedicated to Stalin in Eastern Europe,
for example, were built either to celebrate his anniversary, or to celebrate
the anniversary of victory in the Second World War. Monuments, as one
historian of Bulgarian monumental art observed, were “connected with
the necessity to create a celebratory mood and to decorate and
aesthetically shape the town or the village” (Trufeshev 1978). This spirit
of celebration and festivity suffused the whole context in which
monuments of the period functioned. The laying of wreaths, holding of
memorial celebrations, fireworks, oath giving rituals, etc. – these were
all elements of a discourse, in which the enormity of death was
encountered and surpassed by the vitality of the post-war period, by the
notion of revival and rebirth following the war. Even special days dedicated
to dead heroes and tragic events were “indirectly connected with the
happiness of the overcome grievous occasion and the coming of a happy
future” (Trufeshev 1978). All this not only made life and death exchange
their meanings, but also helped reverse meanings, as if, in the dialectics
264