"Българският светец" Терапонт или превъплъщенията на един култ
The "Bulgarian Saint" Therapont or the transformations of a worship

Summary/Abstract: The article once more raises the question about the nature of the "folk worship" of St. Therapont (Therapontius) in a restricted region of central West Bulgaria. Few ethnographic data are compared with written sources from 14-18 c. about the worship of the saint on that soil. There could be sought and it si rightfully done (also by earlier authors) the roots of the subsequent integration of this cult in the traditional culture. The strive is to study the mechanisms of formation to a folk cult, and the actual correlation between the worship of and the concept of the saint and thus the analysis unfolds controlling both levels of development of the worship - the "traditional-folk" and the literary one. The study of ethnographic background reveals associative and ritual techniques which make possible the transformations of separate blocks of the literary narrative at the level of folklore notions. The transformation- essential, formal and functional, of a hagiographical image is studied. Thus the comparative study of hagiographical-liturgical literature - both byzantine originals and Slavonic translated narratives, enlightening many questions by themselves, comes to the core. The analysis allows to make the statement that in this particular case there is a clear transition between different levels of religious conception of the world, coinsided by a flow of a set of notions from the "high" culture of literary sources to the "low culture" of the oral tradition- Through a series of contaminations from the initially existing two Greek hagiographical traditions appeared on single legend narrative, in which are preserved only the components, bearing an ideological (for the current moment) charge. The distribution of written data shows that the spread of the worship of this saint took place during the early centuries of Ottoman rule. The adaptation to a radically different socio-cultural model and to a new religious dominance activate the folklore recording of official structures, belonging previously to the "high" culture, and include the "Bulgarian-transferred" St. Therapont in the Christian paradigm of popular resistency. The phenomenon could not be separated from the reanimation of the prechristian layer of notions and ritual system, constantly present in medieval Bulgarian culture.

• Details
• Contents