Bones of Contention: The Living Archive of Vasil Levski and the Making of Bulgaria's National Hero (Hardcover)

Introduction

Part I. Bones of Contention or Professionals, Dilettantes, and Who Owns History

1. A "social drama" at the BulgarianAcademy of Sciences

2. From breach to crisis

3. No redress, or where are Levski's bones?

4. "Professionals" and "dilettantes"

5. Recognizing the schism or what is worse: bad professionals or good nationalists?

Part II. The Apostle of Freedom or What Makes a Hero?

1. What is a hero and are heroes born?

2. The "making" of Vasil Levski

3. A banner for all causes: appropriating the hero

4. Contesting the hero

5. The literary and visual hypostases of the hero

6. From hero for all to dissident and back

Part III. The National Hero as Secular Saint: The Canonization of Levski

1. The split or how a bicephalous organism functions

2. The canonization and its implications

3. Levski and the Bulgarian church: memory and narration

4. The orchestration of a grass-roots cultus

5. Commemoration, ritual and the sacred

6. Heroes and saints: the dialectics of reincarnation

Conclusion: Weak nationalism and its heroes

Appendices

Appendix I. The scholarly consensus on the 1956 excavations until the 1980s in the writings of Stamen Mikhailov. A critical analysis

Appendix II. The discussion at the Academy of Sciences : 10, 12 and 27 February 1986

Appendix III. Letter of 20 Bulgarian historians to Todor Zhivkov, 4 May 1987

Appendix IV. Poems written by citizens on the topic of Levski's grave

Appendix V. Letter of Radka Poptomova, April 1987

Appendix VI. Letter of medieval section at AI, June 2001

Appendix VII. The double-headed hierarchy of the Bulgarian Orthodox church (1996-2004)

Appendix VIII. School questionnaires on Levski

Appendix IX. Samples of student papers on Levski

Appendix X. Facsimile of report by Chervenkov and Pavlov to Todor Zhivkov, 1956. (Grobit na Vasil Levski, 2002, 150-151, 155). + mention in Part I, n. 165