This ambitious volume builds on a sophisticated understanding of historical “legacies” and their distinction from the selective “tradition,” something shared by all contributors, thus providing a common theoretical background usually absent from collective works. The excellent introduction and the fifteen chapters mostly focus on legacies as perception and thus bring in also the enormous theoretical literature on memory. The volume analyzes three main legacies deemed central to the region—war, socialism, and transition. This should have been the subtitle, since the present one ominously sustains all clichés about the Balkans, as if war, conflict, and ideology do not overshadow legacies/memories in any other part of the globe. How about the long shadow of ethnic and religious diversity and co-existence, savoir vivre and humor? But it also reflects the chapters’ makeup, where more than half (eight) are on Yugoslavia, two on Romania, two on Bulgaria and one each on Albania, Greece, and the Roma community.
Unsurprisingly, the bulk of the contributions focus on the transition from socialism and the post-socialist period, particularly its material remains. In their chapter on the treatment of socialist material culture, especially the monumental lapidars, Matthias Bickert and Irida Vorpsi document an interesting distinction of Albania from the other post-communist countries, namely the preservation of these monuments, sometimes re-purposed, but often taken at face-value, as strengthening national pride and identity. Conversely, Jovana Janinović looks at mnemonic restoration, the re-surfacing of Josip Broz Tito's legacy in urban public spaces in ex-Yugoslavia. She offers a multifaceted analysis of the diverse, often opposing, motives and expectations, from commercialization to political polarization, cultural diversification, and nostalgia. A third example is the unique and idiosyncratic “antiquisation,” the branding policy that took hold of Macedonia after the 1990s. Mišo Dulmanović writes that it started as a tool for political mobilization but “was mostly about corruption rather than identity and nationalism” (264). A final instance, this time of complete obliteration of the socialist past comes from Croatia, where a virtual “libricide” took place resulting in the destruction of millions of books. Dora Komnenović documents attempts to contest this “normalization of a scandal” (301) through film, books, and especially the exhibition “Discarded,” which launched the digitization of discarded books for an open online archive.
Other contributions deal with the non-physical aspects of the socialist legacy, from politics to everyday life. Marietta Stankova, author of the latest critical biography of Georgi Dimitrov, engages with the tangible remnants of the Dimitrov cult to highlight the complexity of entangled legacies leading to a continuously revisited memory. Complicating notions of totalitarian control, dissidence, resistance and accommodation to power, Ruxandra Petrinca offers a fascinating picture of two vacation villages in Dobrudja, 2 Mai and Vame Veche, as liminal spaces of alternative culture, which became emblems of freedom and communal feeling, “sites of behavior tolerated but not fully controlled by the socialist regime” (191). The aptly titled “YU-rovision” by Irena Šentevska deals with the instrumentalization of the Eurovision song contest both in the former Yugoslavia and in its successor states for nation-building purposes, even as the contest itself has shifted toward neoliberal cosmopolitanism focusing on gender equality and sexual minority rights. In “Glimpses of the Other” Mãdãlina Alamã, Bob Ives, and Kenneth Bleak posit that despite efforts at inclusion after 1989, eugenicist views predating socialism are revived vis-à-vis the Roma community and people with disabilities.
One of the original contributions to the volume is the insistence in the introduction that legacies are shaped as much by short-term events as by long-term processes like institutions, policies, behaviors, and attitudes. As such, wars, revolutions, and coup d’états are not merely ruptures that are bridged over by legacies, but with their intensity become legacies in their own right, exercising long-term impact on their societies (4–5). Regrettably, this insight is directly pursued by very few chapters, but when taken up is well developed, such as the strong piece by Vjeran Pavlaković on the legacy of the Second World War in Croatian nation-building and how it has been enmeshed with the memory of the War of Independence in the 1990s, imagined as its continuation. Unfortunately, while this legacy is harnessed as a patriotic building block by right-wing politicians, it remains equally divisive for the society at large. In his cursory essay, Stevan Bozanich deals with the re-purposing of the hajduk warrior tradition during the wars of the 1990s (both çete and hajduk are Turkish words). Markus Wien in his piece on the royal legacy in Bulgaria demonstrates how it culminated in a “short-lived phenomenon of limited significance” (275), namely the ascendancy of the former king Simeon II to the post of prime minister between 2001 and 2005.
While not taking up explicitly the matrix of the short-term event, Katharina Tyran's chapter shows the definitive effect of 1921, with the new borders after the First World War, for fracturing the once cohesive community of the Burgenland Croats. The interesting chapter of Alina Thiemann shows “how the ambiguities surrounding the Romanian Revolution turned this historical juncture into a political resource in the struggle for political support and legitimacy” (167). It also gives a chronology to the duration of this short-term legacy, which had communism as its token until 2009, when the theme of corruption and nationalism came to the fore in political debates. On the other hand, Dragana Kovačević Bielicki speaks of legacy as burden and shows how the ethnification of Yugoslav refugees is caught up in a vicious circle of constant reproduction of othering and exclusion. Evi Gkotzaridis's passionately researched and original chapter provides an excellent critical overview of the growing literature of the long-suppressed memory of the Greek Civil War and offers a mirror image to the other contributions, that of an anti-communist legacy, still haunting the Greek memory scape.
Written by a group of historians, anthropologists, educational and cultural scholars, most chapters are of high quality and as a collective work, this volume succeeds in presenting a unified effort to disentangle the myriad ways in which legacies work.
