The National Festival of Folklore in Koprivshtitsa in the Context of a Local Community
The National Festival of Folklore in Koprivshtitsa in the Context of a Local Community

Summary/Abstract: The article describes the National Festival of Folklore in Koprivshtitsa in through the eyes of a particular local community, that of the village of Bistritsa, Sofia region. The study is based on fieldwork conducted in January 2015 at the local community centre. The main method of investigation is the semi-structured interview, which offers local people the opportunity to select the most significant moments in their narratives and to express their own understanding and interpretations of folklore heritage. The authors pay particular attention to the processes of transformation of local tradition into cultural heritage, which became especially visible after the 1930s and the 1940s. The text outlines the processes and means by which the local community presents its culture and understands the necessity of its contemporary safeguarding as a living practice. The influence of local and national cultural institutions is duly marked, including the influence of the local community centre and the National Festival of Folklore in Koprivshtitsa. Special attention is also given to these institutions’ contributions towards the conceptualization of different elements of the respondents’ local culture and the ways in which local culture becomes a resource for the construction of different networks of identities: cultural, local and national. The text also highlights the basic accents and interpretations in the narratives of the respondents who discuss the National Festival; the Festival’s importance as a place for the representation of their traditional village cultural elements; its role in their preservation; the character of the Festival stage and changes to it through the years; as well as the personal experiences of the community members during the Festival.

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