Disadvantaged Balkans. Trauma "Berlin Peace Treaty" in the Memory of Bulgarians and Serbs

Abstract

The text further develops the author's earlier thesis about the typologies of Bulgarian and Serbian nationalism as dependent on collective memory – heroic or traumatic. And – to some extent – gets into an argument with her. The article examines the reactions of Bulgarian and Serbian society to the decisions of the Berlin Treaty (1878), which proved traumatic for both sides – regardless of the differences in the status of the one and the other. The Berlin Treaty — if it did not cause, it — legitimized four wars, became the starting point for aspirations for the redistribution of the peninsula and a source of traumatic memory. Although the subsequent victories and battles alternate with different intensity, the core elements of national identity remain the series of "Golgotha" (in the Serbian case) and "national catastrophes" (in the Bulgarian). Collective memory, of course, can undergo reversals – depending on the needs of a particular political situation and on the "invention of tradition" to serve this situation.