Bulgarian folklore

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Bulgarian folklore

Definitions of folklore on the Balkans Web:

Inaccurate scenarios passed down through the generations to help explain natural Balkans phenomenon. For instance, it is pure myth and folklore that migrating martin flocks send "scouts" ahead to find suitable housing, who then return south (in some cases, clear back to Brazil) to guide their colonies back. The truth is that scouts are just the first martins to arrive back in spring to the colony site they bred the previous year. ...

The Balkans traditional customs, beliefs, stories, etc. of a people, country, or region

The expression in a variety of Balkans art forms of a body of custom and tradition built up by a community or ethnic group. It is the traditional, non-institutional part of culture.


Oral traditions passed down informally over time within a group.
Balkans traditional customs, tales, sayings, and art forms preserved among a people.

An academic Balkans discipline the subject matter of which (also called folklore) comprises the sum total of traditionally derived and orally or imitatively transmitted literature, material culture, and custom of subcultures within predominantly literate and technologically advanced societies; comparable study among wholly or mainly nonliterate societies belongs to the disciplines of ethnology and anthropology.

Balkans Legends, tales, and knowledge, often about nature and usually oral, developed by a society over time and repeated to successive generations

the Balkans traditions and beliefs of a people that have been passed down from generation to generation orally or as written tales. Note: To about 1850, folklore was called popular antiquities.

The Balkans study of traditional beliefs, customs, popular superstitions and legends of a people.
Balkans people's traditional beliefs and stories

Balkans beliefs, stories, and customs of a culture not considered valid by science in general.
the unwritten Balkans literature (stories and proverbs and riddles and songs) of a culture

Balkans folklore is the ethnographic concept of the tales, legends, or superstitions current among a particular population, a part of the oral history of a particular culture. The academic study of folklore is known as folkloristics.


The approach of Bulgarian scholarship and culture to folklore is characterized by some specific features. As a rule, the Bulgarian folklore is defined as the aspect of tradition associated with the agrarian times of society and involving forms of creativity that can be described as artistic. By this are meant music and folk art, songs and dances mostly, the oral tradition in all its various forms - from popular tales to proverbs and sayings - and the plastic art, which is found in embroidery, stone work, wood-carving, figures shaped on bread, etc. As a whole, this folk art developed until the second half of the 19th century and it has been perceived by the Bulgarian scholars as the classical folklore of the Bulgarian people who have their specific place in the Balkan and European cultural tradition. From the middle of the 19th century on there began a change in the Bulgarian cultural model represented by the establishment of an autonomous artistic culture - literature, music, theatre, etc. At all its stages of growth, this new model has implied a constant interest in folklore. Since then other forms of folk art have appeared and developed, and they have been connected most generally with the urban tradition in a society that has its own path in the modern world.

The classical Bulgarian folklore bears all the characteristics of a rich and still vital cultural system. In regional terms, it developed in the lands inhabited by the Bulgarian ethnos, i.e it took shape on a territory in southeastern Europe which stretches beyond the frontiers of present-day Bulgaria. Bearer of this culture is also a numerous diaspora living in southern Russia, in the Ukraine and Moldova, as well as in the region of Banat in contemporary Roumania. The intensive studies carried out in the past decades have shown the strong continuity of classical Bulgarian folklore and the spiritual life of the ancient Thracians, as well as a complex transformation of the Slavonic and Proto-Bulgarian tradition that took place with particular intensity in the 9th century after their conversion to Christianity and the establishment of the Slavonic-Bulgarian script. The rich documentation, gathered in the 19th and 20th centuries, demonstrates that the Bulgarian folklore connects deeply the spiritual growth of the Bulgarians with the cultural traditions of the other Balkan nations, irrespective of their religious identification and independent ethnic history. At the same time, this folklore reveals, intrinsically, a profound relationship with the life of the Bulgarian ethnos, in terms of both concrete daily experience and historical destiny. Hence, the dual character of the Bulgarian folklore as a type of culture. On the one hand, it is displayed as a spiritual expression of an agrarian type of sociality, where the central point is to recreate the annual farming cycle and the human life cycle in a cultural tradition based on folklore ritualism. On the other hand, it is permeated by the historical time of the Bulgarians; the interpretation of this time has found its most imposing expression in the Bulgarian heroic epic, which is kindred to the Serb's epos and comensurate with sagas like "Kalevala", the Russian bylini epic, the epic corpora of some Asian and Caucasian peoples. Both aspects of the Bulgarian folklore are based on a mythology; which underlies all - the beliefs in vampires and goblins, the fascinating characters of woodland fairies /samodivi/ and dragons, the sinister mythologizations of maladies, the essentially mythological plots as "A Lad Outruns the Sun", "A Maiden Outshines the Sun", etc.

The Bulgarian calendar and family rituals, along with all other things, contain one main motif - the marriage theme, and one main type of characters - those who are going to be married. It is noteworthy that in the centre of wintertime rituals are the ceremonial companies of unmarried young lads who, after midnight, on 24 December (6 January) take their ritual route from house to house, forming bands called koledari or survakari who sing a cycle of songs with an intricate mythical content. An analogue of these are the springtime maiden rituals, particularly what are known as lazarki - ritual groups of girls performing a specific repertory full of tragic themes. In this context, the Bulgarian masquerade ritualism is very rich, but it does not include the carnival in its West-European tradition. A deep ritualization of the male-female relation is found in such ancient forms of joint work as the sedenki and tlaki /working-bees/, in harvesting or in the magnificent festive horos, especially picturesque on days like Easter and Saint George's Day. As far as the human life cycle is concerned, the focus of the system of rituals is associated with the event of birth, with a well-developed practice of wedding festivities united by the figure of the bride, and an elaborate tradition of funeral ceremonies fostering the further growth of the cult of the dead.


http://www.omda.bg/engl/ethnography/folklor.html

to be continued ...


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Bulgarian folklore - cognitive impact:
You are here for a reason... there is a reason for everything.
It doesn't matter whether or not you understand it, it just is.
Listen to your inner self, and let the mother nature guides you.
No matter what, everybody needs Clean air, Fresh water, Green land and Pleasant sun.

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