Kyustendil Spring Day: Post-Socialist Re-inventions and Transformations of a Socialist Festival

Abstract

The article presents a case study of Kyustendil Spring Day, a traditional local holiday associated with the spring equinox, (re)invented as a socialist festival in the late 1960s, which has continued to take place uninterrupted to date. It traces the transformations that the festival has gone through in the years of post-socialist transition in Bulgaria looking into the challenges posed to both the (ritual) form and the (semantic) content of the festival after the collapse of the Bulgarian socialist state in 1989.

As the analysis shows, the imperatives of global popular culture and the new economic and political realities have brought about new actors, symbols, rituals and venues in the old festive scenario of Kyustendil Spring Day. Two distinct periods in its post-socialist development are distinguished: the early post-socialist years of the 1990s when the holiday was radically privatised by local businessmen (i.e. sponsors), commercialised (i.e. patented as a festival), and spectacularised; and the most recent years, when it was re-claimed by the local municipality, re-traditionalised, and instrumentalised in local town branding strategies. In spite of the seemingly undisputed success of Kyustendil Spring Day as a town holiday today, the critical voices raised about the festival’s exhausted social function and its commercialisation in the present suggest that it might have reached a critical point in its life course, and that new re-inventions, i.e. new re-semantisation,