Народните песни за Пеньо Чернеоолу – страшен хайдутин
Folk Songs about Penio Cherneoolou – the Terrible Haidouk

Summary/Abstract: The late-epic folk songs about Penio Cehrnoolou, a real hero of the Battle of Shipka Pass, are favoured by the performers at folk fairs and contests. Their spread goes beyond regional boundaries and these occur both in villages in the region of Kazanluk such as Shipka, Hajji Dimitrovo, Sredno Izvorovo, Koprinka, Buzovgrad, etc., and in other regions in the north-eastern parts of Bulgaria: Paskalevo (the region of Tolbukhin), Kalipetrovo (the region of Silistra), etc. The wide variety of these songs exists in a number of versions in terms both of the lyrics and tunes. This research seeks to trace out the functionality and variations in the samples under consideration as well as the themes related to various sides of his character and stories of his life in view of as many songs about Penio Cehrnoolou as possible (being open to any new versions) of a certain period of time (at this stage, o f the early 1970s). Various songs about Penio Cehrnoolou are found in fieldworks of recorders Konstantin Zagotov, Christo Iliev Lekov, Ivan Kachulev, Elena Stoin, Todor Todorov, Nikolay Kaufman, Todor Djidjev, Danka Zaiakova to name just a few. Writer Chudomir give invaluable biographical details about Penio Cehrnoolou and there are very interesting notes taken during fieldwork and kept at the Folk Music Archive of the Institute of Art Studies, which contribute much to the life story of the cha racter. My research interest in this case lies in a relatively small fragment of the music folklore of Kazanluk, a successive stage of a wider project, related to the preservation of folk heritage of the region.

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