The article presents the analysis of a novel by Stefan Canev 'Mravki i BOGOVE. Khronika na XX vek' (Ants and Gods. The Chronicle of the Twentieth Century). The novel is an attempt at reckoning with the passing century. In his multidirectional and intracultural discourse Canev seeks to clarify the relationship between the cultural tradition of the Bulgarians and their understanding of history. To achieve this, Canev reevaluates notions mythicalised in the 20th C. reflection on national heritage, such as: protobulgarism, paganism, bogomilism. The construction of the world presented in the novel points to their role as an active culture creating force. Manichaean picture of the earth as a Satan's dominion becomes an antithesis to the Enlightenment view of history driven by the idea of progress. Due to the allegoric expression created in the Canev's work by a circle of repetitions, history appears to be not a mechanism of eternal life and progress but a process of fading, decay and disillusion of historical ethos.
The article presents Polish research on the Bulgarian national mythology. First person to study the subject was Teresa Dabek-Wirgowa. Within the spectrum of her interest was the problem of personified symbols of values crucial for the process of forming cultural community (e.g., tsar, bumpkin, and 'hayduck'), issues concerned with the image of a stranger in the Bulgarian culture, as well as the category of mythologised national space. In the 1990s. Further studies have been taken up by such scholars as Maria Bobrownicka, Wojciech Galazka, Jolanta Sujecka, Celina Juda, and Grazyna Szwat-Gylybowa. The researchers focused on the subsequent aspects of myth-creating tendency of the Bulgarians who constantly reinvent their tradition. The article attempts also to reflect on the problem of the social function of such research since it is stigmatized with 'symbolic violence'.
The article presents the problem of constructing the Balkans as an 'invented' national space of the Bulgarians who in the period of national revival (1762-1878) made an effort to form their national symbolic universe. The process of seeking national tradition was accompanied by the change in the civilization paradigm, abandoning the Ottoman model and turning to the European one, as well as deliberate functionalization of the folk-Orthodox culture. As a result of the interference of folk models and writers' linguistic and artistic practice the Turkish lexeme balkan has been transformed not only into a sign of national space but also an ambiguous symbol of 'Bulgarianness' which undergoes constant ideological reinterpretations.
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