Flowers for the Liberator: A Postcolonial Feminist Reading of the Monument to Bulgarian–Soviet Friendship in Varna
Flowers for the Liberator: A Postcolonial Feminist Reading of the Monument to Bulgarian–Soviet Friendship in Varna

Summary/Abstract: This study examines the endurance of the ‘Liberation’ narrative in Bulgaria through a postcolonial reading of the Monument to Bulgarian–Soviet Friendship in Varna. It foregrounds what the monument debates often overlook: not only what these sites commemorate, but how they teach subjects to feel history. It argues that the monument operates as colonial pedagogy, rendering geopolitical hierarchy affectively compelling by mobilising gendered imperial repertoires. It reveals a palimpsestic memory structure in which imperial, nationalist, and socialist meanings accumulate. Within this layered formation, the ‘Liberator’ emerges not as a fixed referent but as a mutable, travelling script. Bulgaria’s fractured post-socialist identity thus reflects not only unresolved historical debates but also colonial logics.

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