SACRED PROTECTORS IN THE OLD REALM OF ROMANIAN IMAGINATION – SAINT PARASCHEVA
SACRED PROTECTORS IN THE OLD REALM OF ROMANIAN IMAGINATION – SAINT PARASCHEVA

Summary/Abstract: Saint Parascheva or Saint Friday (Saint Petca) entered the realm of imagination in old Romanian culture through canonical literature. The passage of this character from canonical to apocryphal literature is part of a transfer facilitated by the absence of distinctions between genres in ancient times. The common system of tracing the origins of the most widespread literary types – homilies, hagiographies, folk novels, chronographies, etc. – as well as the specific conditions of reception in ancient times has allowed the moving of the characters from one genre to another, without forcing the limits of plausibility required by certain reading habits and precarious scientific information. Such mutations are not visible predominantly in the case of historical characters that have become characters of an entertaining literature frequently using instruments of the fantastic as being significant when the characters derived from the historical space (see Alexander the Great) enter the fantastic realm, which has a long tradition in the literature of entertainment. The work suggests a reception route, as well as a writing route that the canonical character Saint Parascheva traveled passing from religious to apocryphal and folklore literature. Referring to the variant of the legend of Saint Friday from Codex Sturdzanus we would thus like to point out the patterns that facilitated the assimilation of this character in Romanian folklore and thence allowed its access to religious collective memory. Sticking to a route imposed by pre-established labels and stereotype formulae, the legend confirms the mechanisms of production and typology-rendering specific to folklore literature.

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