New Europe College Regional Program Yearbook 2001-2002

NIKOLAI VUKOV
To have a local hero in a town or village was sufficient precondition for
raising their status. Not only were towns and villages renamed after special
figures of the antifascist and communist movement, but the practice of
upgrading villages to towns or regional centers because an important
hero or influential antifascist was born there was not an infrequent event.
Ironically, it seems, the magical power of relics and of sacred biographies
does not seem to have changed much throughout history.
Equally reminiscent of older epochs, heroes in the post-Second World
War pantheon served as exemplars 21 – death and exploits needed to be
repeated. The presence of exploits had to permeate everyday life and
bodies had to live an intensified life, in a position of permanent
attentiveness. The steps and the deeds of the heroes had to be followed
so that their will of a “bright future” would come true. The acts of Heroes
of denying death (by its fearless acceptance) had to be reenacted by
observation and attentiveness so that their acts would live for “us”. Only
by being with the heroes, and thus being a hero himself/herself, could
the enormity of death be faced and surpassed. Only a hero could actually
transform death into life, the morbid into regenerative status. Socialist
heroes were not simply mediators between those radically opposed worlds,
but figures, which covered and encompassed this polarity within them.
However, it is possible to suggest that the fact they were such powerful
symbols is mainly due to their split and double nature, that is, as V.
Turner would say – “precisely because like all dominant or focal symbols,
they represented a coincidence of opposites, a semantic structure in tension
between opposite poles of meaning” (Turner 1974:89). They were at once
victims and victors, dying and living, then and now.
Monuments served as embodiments of these exemplary narratives and
life-providing narratives of communist sacrifices. They had to cover the
wide span of meanings inscribed in the ideological dialectics of death
and life, and to give it vivid expression. An important element of this
regime of life and death symbolism was the notion of the sacred, which
permeated the space of socialist monuments and constituted the nature
of the ritual acts performed around them. It could be traced in the images
of sacred life and death, as represented in the monumental compositions;
in the waves of pilgrimage and ritual meetings on special occasions
around monuments; in individuals’ ritualized behavior around monumental
sites; in the establishment of cult and even “totemic” figures of reference,
narratives, and interpretative frameworks, etc. The monumental
embodiments of socialist heroes were loci where the “divine” power of
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