Vanga, la «Pythie bulgare»

Galia Valtchinova, Vanga, the « Bulgarian Pythia »: Ideas and Uses of Antiquity in Bulgaria, DHA 31/1, 2005, p. 93-127. Abstract: Taking cue from a case study of a seer celebrated as national prophetess, in socialist Bulgaria, this paper is dedicated to the political [abjuses of ancient history in the 20th century Balkans. Its first part is an exploration of the social and cultural construction of the seer Vanga in the context of post-Ottoman Macedonia, successively dominated by three nation-States Bulgaria, and the Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia), as well as in Bulgarian Macedonia under socialism. The second part starts by a glance to the political uses and abuses of Greek Antiquity in various Balkan national historiographies, and concentrates on the developments of « thracology » - the dominating trend in the recent Bulgarian historiography of Antiquity - in the 1970s and 1980s. This examination highlights the construction of Vanga as the "Bulgarian Pythia" by outstanding thracologists as a strategy of use and appropriation of the symbolic capital related to Greek Antiquity for political purposes. The paper outlines how, by recourse to a certain comparative approach, a branch of the historiography of Antiquity has made for the positive and prestigious image of a contemporary Balkan religious virtuoso under communism, in the same time veiling its cultural background and its social dimensions. It also argues for a critical réévaluation of historiography of ancient Greece, which, loosing the innocence of « objectivism », is increasingly caught between nationalist discourses and the politics of national (or imperial) grandeur

Ancient history · Archaeology · Bulgarian · Communism · Historiography · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Socialism · Balkans: History, Politics, Society · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious Tourism and Spaces