[31 October 2007]
Sofia, 31 October 2007 – The Iztok-Zapad Publishing House announced that on 30 October it released a bi-lingual (Bulgarian and German) catalogue of the exhibition “Batak as a Place of Bulgarian Memory", compiled by Martina Baleva. The exhibition never took place.
In May 2007, an exhibition and a scientific discussion were scheduled to take place in Batak and Sofia dedicated to the way in which the so called “major historical stories” are formed and disseminated. They were supposed to be based on Martina Baleva’s research on the history of the painting of the Batak massacre by Polish artist Antoni Piotrowski, and the way in which the painting and the events that it depicts penetrate the corpus of Bulgarian memory.
But because of fierce opposition from a number of historians, public speakers and politicians, the planned events did not take place. Their organisers’ security could not be guaranteed and thus they were in fact banned.
Thus, for the first time after 1989 censorship was imposed on intellectual and cultural events and the rights to freedom of speech and to dissemination of information were violated. The published catalogue is the only trace of these cultural events banned through censorship.
Source: BHC
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