ABSTRACT
Belene Island constitutes one of Bulgaria’s profoundly contested memoryscapes: infamous as the country’s most notorious communist-era forced-labour camp and home to one of Europe’s vitally important ecological regions, the island’s past and present belie a harmonious historical narrative. Belene Island became the site of the country’s largest communist-era forced-labour camp and prison complex often remains unsaid. Belene Island was so well situated that despite official pronouncements of its closure in 1959, the camp never completely shut down and remained operational throughout most of the communist regime. The work of individual academics, civil society activists, archivists, NGOs, investigative journalists, filmmakers, and, in recent years, that of the Catholic priest Paolo Cortezi, based in the town of Belene, bear special mention. The outcome of these individual and sometimes collaborative projects is important, but it remains fragmented.
