Viţa-de-vie. Simboluri, credinţe şi practici populare
The Grapevine. Symbols, Beliefs and Traditional Practices

Summary/Abstract: This article refers to the exceptional cultural career of the grapevine, which has spread from the dawn of the Greek Antiquity until the modern era. Associated to the cult of Dionysus, the god of wine but also of pleasure and promoter of agriculture, the grapevine presents powerful forms of manifestation also in the Thracian-Dacian space, North Pontic Greek colonies as well as in the Roman Dacia, as the antique literary sources, epigraphic texts, coin issuing or various graphic representations attest. Vetero- and neotestamentary texts, which have a crucial role in our spiritual configuration, reveal the divine hypostasis of the grapevine, highlighted by folk beliefs and narrations presenting biblical themes. Relying on older documentary sources, but also on field research, the author refers to the climaxes of the viniculture calendar and brings under discussion the sequence of beliefs, rites and ritual ensembles that animate our ethnographic and folkloric landscape. Each stage included in the process of transforming vine into wine is accompanied and supported by a set of magic acts meant to insure prosperity. The article points out the positive potential of the grapevine, a plant that integrates an ample set of values; it also highlights the existence of a permanent dialogue between the religious and the traditional thinking, the exchange of values or the re-semantization.

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