Remembering Through Silence: Orthodoxy as a Repository of Post-Communist Memory in Bulgaria

This article examines the role of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church in shaping post-communist memory in Bulgaria, arguing that religion can function as a repository of collective memory even in the absence of explicit commemorative narratives. While much of the literature on post-communist memory emphasizes state-led reckoning, truth commissions, and public memorialization, this study shifts attention to the silent, ritualized, and moral dimensions through which the communist past is remembered and negotiated. Drawing on theories of cultural memory and performative politics, the article conceptualizes silence not as forgetting, but as a distinct mode of memory transmission. In post-1989 Bulgaria, the Orthodox Church has largely avoided direct engagement with its own entanglements with the communist regime, including documented collaboration with State Security. Instead of articulating a narrative of martyrdom or resistance, the Church preserves the memory of communism indirectly, through liturgical continuity, moral discourse on “atheistic totalitarianism,” and the symbolic framing of Orthodoxy as the enduring ethical core of the nation. Based on a qualitative discourse analysis of official statements, the article demonstrates how memory is embedded in ritual repetition, symbolic absence, and affective moral cues rather than in explicit historical narration. This mode of remembrance constructs communism as a diffuse moral trauma while simultaneously deflecting questions of institutional accountability. The Church thus emerges as a non-state memory regime that stabilizes national identity through continuity rather than rupture, endurance rather than resistance. By foregrounding silence as a productive memory practice, this article contributes to memory studies by expanding the analytical repertoire beyond overt commemoration and legal reckoning. It further advances scholarship on religion and post-authoritarian politics by showing how religious institutions can exercise mnemonic authority without engaging in explicit memory politics. In doing so, the article offers new insights into the affective and symbolic foundations of moral authority in post-communist societies.