In a series of richly illustrated short essays, Hidden Galleries presents the ways in which the secret police of the communist-era collected and curated religious material, images and objects in their archives. Based on painstaking documentation by a team of eight historians, anthropologists and scholars of religion in archives in Hungary, Romania, Ukraine and Moldova, this volume offers a rare window on the creativity of underground religious life, and its ideological representation as well as exploring the significance for religious communities and wider society today of this legacy of repression and surveillance.
James Kapaló is senior lecturer in the Study of Religions at University College Cork, Ireland and co-director of the Marginalized and Endangered Worldviews Study Centre (MEWSC).
Tatiana Vagramenko is an anthropologist and a postdoctoral researcher at University College Cork, Ireland and a George F. Kennan Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC.