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Free Sofia Tour's Blog

December 31, 2015

Christmas or New Year’s? A Communist Take

Christmas in Bulgaria during communist times If you have read our 5 Bulgarian Christmas facts and traditions post, you already know how we celebrate Christmas in Bulgaria nowadays. But during the 45 years of Communism in our country (1944 – 1989) things were quite different. The reason: communist countries were officially atheist, so it was seen as completely inappropriate to celebrate religious holidays. Informally, however, most people would still celebrate secretly at home with their families. So, the communist government had to come up with ideas to discourage the people to celebrate Christmas, Easter and other religious holidays. In this blog post we would talk about… Four ways to discourage celebrating Christmas during the Communist period: The power of TV How do you create a situation where people would prefer to stay home on Christmas Eve, rather than go to church? Easy! The Communist party came up with the idea to broadcast movies from Western countries (the USA, the UK, France, Italy etc.) on national television. These were otherwise almost […]