Looking up, you glimpse a long slice of iron. Your eyes trace it to its source, an iron hand, then trace that to its source, a statue of a proud wife facing the future with her husband, his gun raised in triumph. It is a perfect example of Socialist-Realist art, but you are not in a museum, nor in a statue park. This is not Prague, which can afford to wipe clean its physical past, nor Budapest, which has chosen to consolidate its past outside of town for tours. You are in Sofia, Bulgaria, where Communism – boldly in the parks and subtly elsewhere - continues to lay a claim on modernity.
In Prague, all artistic traces of communism are gone.
Statues like these on the Charles Bridge tend to be religious or political.
In Budapest, more than twenty huge Socialist-Realist statues have been consolidated into an underfunded statue park on the fringe of the city. A tour bus arrives at the grounds outside Buda each winter day at 11:30, and takes a load of freezing tourists back to the comfort of Pest at 1:00.
In Sofia, many of the statues towering over downtown parks have been towering for over two decades, still representing the false glory of a bygone political era.
1 comment:
Red type on a black field is an arresting combination, and the content of this post caught my interest, too.
Three countries, three responses to the past! Is money the main factor in the differences? Are the sculptors of any remaining statues known? Thanks for your work, Betsy.
Post a Comment