Devoted freedom fighters, manly Red Army soldiers and workers, visionary or thoughtful Communist leaders: this is what comes to mind when we think of Communist-era public art statues and monuments. Indeed, these archetypes of exemplary regime citizens were produced en masse between 1944 and 1989 and can still be found all over Bulgaria.

However, in art, ideology is not everything – not even in Socialist Bulgaria. After the late 1950s, when statues commissioned for prestigious and ordinary public spaces invariably featured realistic, heroic depictions of soldiers, guerrilla fighters, workers, Lenins, Stalins and Georgi Dimitrovs, there was a tangible shift in public art. Public spaces started to accommodate statues, murals and other artworks with an aesthetic rather than ideological function. They were intended to create focal points in the environment and add colour to it.

LGBTQ before the concept existed? Red Army monument, Burgas

The subjects were usually idealised girls, couples in love and mothers with children. No matter whether they were interpreted realistically or in a modernist fashion they made the urban environment a bit more palatable as they cushioned the heavy architecture, made the open spaces more human, and expressed sentiments that were important to people regardless of what society they lived in. These were romantic and parental love, and joy of beauty. Surprisingly, some of the female figures look too erotic than would have befitted the puritan Communist society. It seems like a miracle that they were approved for public display by the omnipresent artistic councils that decided what to show in the towns and cities they were entrusted with.

Self-explanatory "Fertility" in Yambol

The emergence of this type of statues reflects the bigger changes in Bulgarian society following the April 1956 Plenum of the Communist Party. The relative liberalisation provided artists in all spheres with greater freedoms. They were no longer compelled to dedicate pictures, novels and plays exclusively to the heroic efforts of the partizani or the achievements of miners and farmers. Artists could now handle everyday life topics, write sci-fi and crime novels, shoot comedies and love stories without fear they would be accused of "crimes" against the aesthetics of Communism such as "formalism," "petty bourgeois conformism," "reactionism" and "Western influences."

Same-sex family in Brezovo?

Obviously, censorship remained in place, especially after the 1968 Prague Spring. While hardening the Party line, Communust dictator Todor Zhivkov skilfully subdued the intelligentsia by proffering privileges and higher living standards few could refuse. Few risked their personal comfort. One who did was writer Georgi Markov, heretofore a darling of the regime. In 1969, he defected following his critical play entitled I Was Him. He started work at the Bulgarian Section of the BBC in London and quickly became a thorn in the eyes of the Communist establishment back home. In 1979 he was assassinated in what went down in history as the notorious Bulgarian Umbrella murder, unsolved to this day.

A nude woman in front of the History Museum in Kazanlak

Compared to his dramatic story the pretty women and the kids of bronze and stone that still stand in Bulgarian parks evoke the times when art in a Communist country was free – as long as it toed a very clearly drawn line.

A young woman in Lukovit

Mother and child, Strazhitsa

Risqué statues of nude women on a bridge in Kyustendil were made by the renowned sculptor, Lyuben Dimitrov