Petko Ogoyski in his collection holding the wooden shoe with a secret hiding-place for medicine and a small pencil, perserved from the forced labour camp in Belene on the island Persin. Petko Ogoyski - one of the few living artists who survived socialist prisons and labor camps, was an important figure in the Bulgarian cultural opposition against the communist regime. As a member of the Bulgarian Agrarian People’s Union-Nikola Petkov (BZNS-Nikola Petkov) and poet/writer, Ogoyski was imprisoned twice (1950-1953 and 1962-1963) by the socialist state for writing “hostile” poems, texts and aphorisms and for “conspiracy”.  

The Tower-Museum was established as a private initiative of the family Petko and Yagoda Ogoyski. The exhibition is partly a national and a local ethnographic one, including household appliances, costumes, and weapons from the 19th and 20th centuries. At the same time, this was a way to circumvent the censorship of the communist regime. Among the ethnographic materials, Petko Ogoyski kept and preserved evidence from the periods of his imprisonment in six prisons and two forced labour camps, as well as notes, books and poems written by him during and after the discharge from prison.  

“The Glossary of Technology” is the name for the special issue of “Vidici” that came out in the spring of 1981. It is one of the most significant dissenting publications that directly relied on the then subversive press trends in Czechoslovakia and Poland. “The Glossary of Technology” acquired a great deal of inspiration from the Solidarity Movement, which some of the journalists and editors were in contact with. In contrast to all previous editions, it was modelled on a manuscript from mediaval times with illustrations and using a calligraphic style. It was completely handmade and crafted with old-fashioned technology. Another specificity was that this issue was conceived as a dictionary with carefully selected samples. The manner in which the dictionary looked had a symbolic meaning. It was a protest against the modern technology-based social systems (Z.P. Piroćanac, Nomenclatura Serbica, 2012, 1). The edition had 171 terms on 30 pages. Some of the terms mentioned were: "WILL – unconditionality. The possessor of movement and the only force that can master it. Will realized as life is personality. Will is without conditions, but it is the condition for everything. “Let there be light,” and there was light. (Book of Genesis); DEMOCRACY – equilibrium. A form of medium of society. This is the technology that cannot be eliminated by an individual. The devilish game of democracy is concerned with knowledge and ignorance, crime and punishment, cruelty and kindness ... (Cummings); MASS – indolence. Being the mass does not mean being part of the crowd, but rather being indistinguishable in the same impersonal frequency of consciousness in general. History is required to vanish in the mass, because it has become complete numbness, pure immanence. A direct consequence of the new role of masses organised into a collective ... is barbarism (Berdyaev); MORALS – mirroring, limiting. Morals are laws realized in the medium of society. Only technologists need morality to avoid collision while moving, however the individual does not need it. Morality is acting egoism. Moral judgments belong to a stage of ignorance in which the distinction between what is real and imaginary is lacking …” (Nietzsche).

All this was too confusing for the political authorities who did not know exactly what was behind this coded edition. The edition was banned, and its subversive nature was discussed in front of the University Commitee of the Union of Communists, where an analysis was initially formulated in the party document "Analysis of the Ideological Orientation of the Journals "Vidici" and "Student".” In it we see that it is precisely the "aesopian language" and that it is impossible to understand the text without a "key" or "code", which worried the party most. Eventually, it was concluded that "The Glossary" was anti-humanist and antisocialist-oriented, which was enough of a reason to ban it. Soon afterwards, the party organs launched a media avalanche that lasted for several months, and the highest party officials spoke of the necessity to reckon with the group gathered around "Vidici" and "Student". However, it turned out that the criticism of "The Glossary" was merely a motive for launching a broader backlash against dissident groups after Tito’s death (1980). The subsequent outcome would be the publication of the "White Book" in 1984, by Croatia’s Communist party leaders, which called for an end to the so-called "cultural counter-revolution".

"Plastic Jesus” (1971) stands as a masterpiece of the Lazar Stojanović collection and is one of the most famous cases of cultural opposition in socialist Yugoslavia. On the surface, the film has a simple plot depicting a strayed director (Tom Gotovac) in his attempt to make a movie while being financially supported by his lovers. However, the film represents a scathing attack on the society of the time, invoking almost all taboos of the era – from the political to the sexual. Stojanović used archival material, showing original footage of Nazis, Chetniks (radical Serbian nationalists), Ustashe (Croatian fascists) and socialist Yugoslavia. The film juxtaposed the totalitarian practices of Nazism and socialism, comparing them in the process. A sharp albeit indirect, satire of Josip Broz Tito rests at the heart of the film.

„Plastic Jesus” was Stojanović’s graduate final project at the Film Academy. It was banned before any public screening and led to Stojanović being brought to trial. The film remained banned until the end of 1990 in Yugoslavia. In 1991, “Plastic Jesus” received the FIPRESCI award at the Montreal film festival.

“I write what I write, state publishers publish from me what they want, and I, however, publish my work as I can.” In 1974, György Konrád summarized the functioning of censorship in an interview given to the West German periodical Die Zeit. The dissident author and activist Konrád was regularly persecuted by the state authorities from the early 1970s. His works were either not published or printed only following thorough censuring. His novel, The City-Builder could be published in Hungary in 1977 only with substantial cuts and modifications forced by the censor.Gábor Klaniczay, the young intellectual interested in counter-culture preserved one copy of Konrád’s novel. This book is unique, however: in his own copy, Klaniczay corrected by himself the parts that were cut or modified by the censor. At that time, the original texts of forbidden or censured works were shared in manuscript or homemade copies among oppositional networks. The book displayed here documents both the intention of suppressing culture and the individual act of resisting it.