Една сватба от с. Хасан-Батър в Украйна. Общностни образи на паметта и идентитета във всекидневния живот на българите от Бесарабия днес
A Wedding in the Village of Hasan-Batar in Ukraine. Collective Images of Memory and Identity in the Everyday Life of Bessarabian Bulgarians Today

Summary/Abstract: Over the period 2005–2008, a research team of the Ethnographic Institute and Museum at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences carried out several field studies in a group of communities of Bulgarian immigrants in Ukraine. The studies encompassed over ten Bulgarian and Gagauz villages in the regions of Bolgrad, Artsisk, Tatarbunar and Izmail near Odessa. The author of this article focused his attention on the wedding customs and rituals of Bulgarian immigrants there not only because the preliminary research plans included this aspect of the culture and traditions of Bulgarian diaspora, but also because of the lucky opportunity for direct observation and recording of “live” material, as the research team came upon a wedding in the village of Hasan-Batar (now called Vinogradnoe, Bolgrad region) in September 2005. The village of Hasan-Batar in Ukraine and its metropolis-community in Bulgaria — the village of Malomir, region of Yambol, have been the subject of research by folklorists, and ethnographic material has been accumulated from three independent sources. This presents a great opportunity to follow the development of wedding customs in one and the same community (more precisely, communities with identical cultural traditions) at different times and under different ethno-cultural and socio-economic circumstances. The comparison of source ethnographic material collected (and presented in a certain way) at time intervals makes it possible to consider not only the essence and dynamics of cultural changes, but also the mechanisms of the process of change; not just the decline or preservation of cultural facts, but also their significance as indicators showing whether the collective identification processes are stabilized or undermined.

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