by Jon Lackman | 4 December 2007 | Uncategorized
According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, art historian Martina Baleva aroused controversy in Bulgaria after researching a painting of an event central to Bulgarian national identity:
Early this year, Martina Baleva and Ulf Brunnbauer, academics at the Institute for Eastern European Studies of the Free University Berlin, planned an exhibition and a conference on a picture by the Polish painter Antoni Piotrowski from the year 1892 entitled “The Massacre of Batak.” The painting is based on a historical event – the murder of Christian Bulgarians at the hands of their Muslim neighbors in the city of Batak in the year 1876 … [What in the painting] is fact and what is legend? Why has Batak, of all places, become a site of pilgrimage? This is what Baleva and Brunnbauer wanted to discuss, but their plans were thwarted. In May, just before the exhibition in Bulgaria, both were hit by a wave of hate … Nonetheless, [Baleva] is determined to see something good arising from all the trouble. “Today, eight million Bulgarians know that the term ‘legend’ can refer to two different concepts – to a fairy tale and to a construction based on a historical event.” And even if not all eight million are up on the finer points of post-modern historical theory, the wider public has experienced a lesson in the political misuse of history. For this alone, says Baleva, “I am grateful to the bloodhounds and defamers.”
