Balkan Identities in Bulgarian Culture

The text represents a theoretical basis of the project. Starting from the modern notions of the myth (N. Frye, R. Barthes, M. Eliade, J. Lotman), analytical psychology (C. Jung, E. Cassirer, Е. Erikson,) and nation (H. Kohn, E. Hobsbawm, E. Gellner,B. Anderson, E. Kedourie, A. Smith) it offers a definition of identity. Potential collective bearers of identity are discussed - ethnic, religious and confessional, social, minority, gender, and age gropes, etc.

There is a formulated thesis for the presence of a set of identities, surrounding and even forming the individual, or for different aspects of a multiple identity with its own hierarchy.

Each identity forms itself around a certain identificational kernel which marks of differentiation, sameness and continuity, coded in some mythology, understood as an important complex of narratives. They settle the relations of the subject with himself and with the Universe. This happens through a building of a system of representations, feelings and strategies, coded in meaningful, evaluation marked and loaded with certain functions figures, with which the identity bearer identifies and correlates itself. The analysis researches the dynamics of the main collective identities and the mythologies they build. Special attention is paid to the forging of the Balkan national mythologies, analysing their variations, studying their common features. The ways are marked through which nationalism reconstructs its past, sacralizing it and identifying with it. Mythical narratives are revealed in historical, philological, ethnological and other scholar works, as well as in literature, journalism and in textbooks.