| Staging the Nation focuses on the cultural production and consumption of heritage to rethink the nature of socialist legacies and of heritage tourism. Consistently overlooked, ideologically motivated restoration practices produced maybe the only thriving material and symbolic socialist heritage and pose questions about their contemporary influence on visitor experiences and collective identities. The longest lasting, most versatile and boldest initiative, Bulgaria's medieval capital, Veliko Tarnovo, exemplifies the 1960s-1980s country-wide heritage campaign, which negotiated between socialist and nationalist paradigms to create and visualize a more desirable community and future. After its complete socialist heritage makeover, 21st century Tarnovo reaps the dividends of a touristic visibility full of ambivalence. Not only did its masterful restoration channel a defensive attitude to mounting systemic problems, but it also supplanted earlier forms of civic tourism. These had embraced heritage stewardship as a means to foster a community of active, socially engaged, entrepreneurial and prosperous citizens. Investigating these processes, I combine a historical and rhetorical approach with ethnographic fieldwork and analyze guidebooks, speeches, political documents, archival proceedings, visual and material culture, and "performances" of self. This project examines the genealogy, cultural and political contexts for Tarnovo's heritage restoration to show the ambivalent legacies of socialist intervention in the town's physical and symbolic appeal and to offer a particular history of heritage-based national self-definitions that point to civic tourism and, may be, similar developments on the Balkans and in Eastern Europe. |
