New Europe College Regional Program Yearbook 2001-2002

NIKOLAI VUKOV
FIG. 7 – THE MAUSOLEUM OF G. DIMITROV IN SOFIA. POSTCARD, 1949.
nature not depend on one particular body only? How can the materially
and tangibly the concreteness of an idea be proved when the life-source
of the material bearer had become a victim of decomposition?
The spirit of disorder and the production of such alarming questions
are not new in themselves and, as anthropologists have often pointed
out, considerable alarm within communities is expected to appear
especially when the matter is about the deaths of leaders (cf. Hertz 1960;
Bloch and Parry 1982). The alarm is related mainly to the split which the
death of leaders has brought to the ultimate unity of representation and is
actually about the continuity of power, which, surpassing the body natural
of the king and his successor, has to unite them in a timeless institution,
a divine center of order, a perpetual source of life. The necessity to
minimize the crisis and cause it to happen as if outside time was expressed
in the magic-like appearance of mausoleums in several cases of death of
a communist leader – huge and elaborate buildings, erected within days
of a leader’s death. The immediate and sudden blow of death was
replicated by immediate assurances of the everlasting nature of the ideas,
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