БОГ НИКОМ ДУЖЛН HE OCTAJE
GOD ALWAYS GIVES EVERYBODY HIS DUE LAYERS IN THE FOLKLORE TEXT AND RE-SEMANTICIZATION OF MOTIVES

Summary/Abstract: The oldest cultural and semantic layer of the poem Bog nikom dužan ne ostaje (God Always Gives Everybody His Due) most likely represents a story about the building sacrifice. The poem records two types of building sacrifice — sacrificing of a male (first-born) child and sacrificing of a girl — but in both cases the ritual meaning of sacrifice is forgotten, and the motives for the killing were reshaped and fit into different contexts: murder of "the child in the cradle" stands as a motivation for the killing of the sister Jelica, and the murder of the girl represents an (adequate) punishment for the (framed) crime. Some motives of this — basically cosmogonal story — coincide with the story about the (potential) wedding initiation of sister Jelica (spatial isolation, the need to separate the girl from her brothers, symbolic death of the initiated).

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