This paper explores the role of the carnivalesque in three protest performances during the antigovernment street protests in Bulgaria in 2013. They represent a form of protest that symbolically reverts the established rituals of a political regime unwilling to recognize the voice of the people in an allegedly democratic nation-state. This assay intersects scholarship on the rhetoric of social movements, carnivalesque performances of protest, and the rhetorical force of iconic images of protest. Through this assay, it is dislosed how the carnivalesque permitted activists to move beyond the norms of democratic dissent in their protests against governmental oppression.