1 In: Wahnich, S., Lasticova, B. & A. Findor (Eds.) (2008). Politics of Collective Memory: Cultural Patterns of Commemorative Practices in Post-War Europe. LIT Verlag: Wien, pp. 179-197. Facing the Ghosts of the Past in Post-communist Bulgaria Svetla I. Kazalarska 1. COMING TO TERMS WITH THE PAST Within the context of what Pierre Nora (2000) has called the current “upsurge in memory”, that has hit on Europe in the recent decades, the strong and fervent efforts on producing memories of communism do not come as a surprise. The radical conversion of the East and Central European communist regimes in the end of the 1980s generated a rupture in the established modus of reproduction and transmission of social and cultural knowledge. Artificial mnemonic devices for fabricating, transferring and translating legacies were therefore desperately needed. The big wave in establishing museums, unveiling memorials, publishing memoirs, and marketing communist nostalgia products throughout the 1990s and the first years of the new millennium, was therefore predictable, if not expected. This, paradoxically, is not the case with Bulgaria where the prevailing “kitchen talk” about communism has not materialized in any substantial memory products. The deadlock situation in the public debate on communism has lasted unchallenged for too long, and has thus considerably hindered the work of memory in the direction of coming to terms with the past. The recent couple of years, however, have registered a subtle turn in the work of collective memory in post-communist Bulgaria – a certain unlocking of the deadlock, which I will try to illustrate with a selection of memory projects. All of these projects are built on the everyday, unofficial, and uninstitutionalized memories of communism, destitute of the grand ideological meanings embedded in them. As late and subtle as this turn may seem to be, it nevertheless testifies to the effects of the current upsurge in memory on a global scale. The statement that Bulgaria or any other post-communist country has not come to terms with its past, usually refers to the more fundamental question: what does it really mean to master the past, and is mastering of the past possible at all. Some of the common views in response to that question include: (a) mastering of the past is possible through institutionalizing remembering and forgetting by means of establishing museums, building monuments, republishing history textbooks, etc.; (b) mastering of the past suggests that a state of reconciliation is to be reached at the end of the process, and (c) mastering of the past is not possible under any condition. The practical applicability of these three views, however, is dubious. I am therefore rather inclined to consent to the understanding, offered by Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche (2002), that “mastering the past is not a process that leads to reconciliation with Nazi crimes but rather a process of learning how to live with the realization that Nazi crimes are part of your history and identity, and nothing, in a sense, can reconcile you to them”. Although placed in the context of de-nazification of