Social Life of Orpheus Imagery: Constructing and Negotiating National Identity1

Abstract

It is a truism today that antiquities are valuable resource of symbolic capital of the modern
nations. Therefore in many research fields a strong focus can be seen on the uses/abuses of the
past in constructing national identity of the “imagined community” of the nation. I isolate the
figure of Orpheus whose Thracian-ness fuelled “the grand national narrative” in Bulgaria, in the
last few decades. It is studied in the context of the shared, connected, and entangled history of
the Balkans produced by Bulgarian, Romanian and Greek scholars. Their valuable reflexive and
critical studies of the usable past are fruitful for the development of new perspectives in the
academic space. The “eye of anthropology” gives priority to cultural phenomena and makes it
possible to evaluate these imageries as cultural products in specific contexts. They are embedded
through different media in everyday life which produce a number of representations –
municipality emblems, narratives, films, monuments of the fabricated “national hero”.