The text presents the most popular ideas about the end of the world that spread in Bulgaria in the post-socialist period. In the years of transition after 1989, social and political changes, as well ...as an economic crisis, favoured apocalyptic expectations. In contrast to the past, when the religious explanation of the world’s end dominated, in contemporary times the apocalypse is more frequently related to cosmic and natural disasters or to the negative effects of human activity. A characteristic view of the end of the world is imagining it as a new beginning. In the present, there is also a transformation in the mechanism for shaping ideas about the end of the world. Modernization, globalization, and new technologies are changing both people’s daily lives and their ideas about the fate of the human world. After the boom of apocalyptic expectations in Bulgarian society at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, in recent years we have seen a rationalization of the eschatological notions and their close connection with ecological and political arguments.
The present text is dedicated to a particular case from the last decade of creating a met¬anarrative, in this sense also of memory and past, of the Monastery of St. Athanasius near the village of ...Zlatna livada, declared the oldest in Europe. Its founding is attributed to one of the key figures of the history of early Christianity, St. Athanasius, which gives the cloister specific sacred nature. The subject of research is indicative of the role of the modern means of communication in constructing popular ideas of the past.
Thus, the “history“ of the Monastery of St. Athanasius becomes a ground for na¬tional pride and self-confidence since, on the one hand, it symbolizes the “deep roots“ of the nation and on the other hand, gives Bulgaria greater symbolic significance in the context of united Europe. The narrative of the ancient past of this Christian clois¬ter proves to be a winning formula since it focuses and expresses hopes and aspira¬tions of various social actors and circles, i.e. becomes part of projects orientated to the future.
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