Heritage Dissonance as an Agent for Change: Forging Memories and Heritage Practices in Post-Socialist Bulgaria

• In Event: Monuments, Memory, and Meaning: Contested Heritage in Political Transitions

Abstract

The contestation of monuments after a political change has become one of the markers of societal transformation. This has been the case since the French Revolution of 1789, which is also considered to be the starting point of the development of heritage consciousness. In the case of post-socialist transitions, the manifestation of heritage dissonance steps on theories and institutions that have been in place for decades. It becomes thus the occasion for renegotiating memories and heritage values.

Through the example of the heritage debates in post-socialist Bulgaria, we propose an analysis of the key points in the dissonant heritage management, concerning the forging of present-day understandings of monuments, of mnemonic practices and renewed aesthetic considerations of public space. Stepping on the work on heritage dissonance by J.E. Tunbridge and G.J. Ashworth (1996), Visnja Kisic (2013), Tuuli Lähdesmäki, Luisa Passerini, Sigrid Kaasik-Krogerus and Iris van Huis (2020), as well as on the theory of “conflictual value” developed by Gabi Dolff-Bonekämper (2003), the objective of this paper is to reveal an agency of heritage dissonance concerning the emergence of new heritage interpretative tools in post-socialist societies.

Author

• Ina Belcheva, New Sorbonne U- Paris 3 (France)