Osobitosti pojedinih običaja pri sklapanju braka u Lici
Characteristics of some Wedding Customs in Lika

Summary/Abstract: The author outlines introductory remarks on articles dealing with particular characteristic phenomena concerning the wedding customs in Lika. Starting point for their selection are student field researches in Pazarište in 1996, and Gacka Valey in 1997. The authors of those articles are students of ethnology who took part in those researches. The following topics were dealt with: Common-law marriage; Village meetings of the youth (prelo); Reconnaissance of the conditions in the house and family of the future spouse; Dowry; Pavenlca — girls evening and knitting of the wedding garland; Wedding flag, and Wedding officers honor members. Some of these topics are so characteristic for the whole area of Lika that they would be motivating enough for an attempt of their thorough analysis and elaboration of a regional synthesis of these significant phenomena from the traditional heritage of Lika. Other topics showed interesting narrower regional characteristics in the researched field, while all of them actually, partly with the exception of the topic on wedding officers, have not been systematically explored so far. While preparing the contributions for this issue the authors were using all available sources: published material, archival material and manuscripts not entered into an inventory, and critically reviewed the articles, each from the angle of the topic she herself had prepared. It has been proven that without using manuscripts the synthetic review of these topics would be incomplete, sometimes hardly possible, in spite of their uneven quality level. This is true for almost every of the covered topics, except maybe for the topic on the knitting of the wedding garland, although contribution of using all the available sources is, also in the elaboration of this topic, important for its more complete and correct determination within the total area of Lika. Synthesized review of each of the selected topics is an important contribution to learning about characteristic phenomena related to the wedding customs, as well as for identifying of their narrow regional characteristics within the context of the whole area of Lika. Besides that, every contribution in this article contributes to new knowledge on some of the issues of traditional heritage of Lika not explored so far. At the same time a range of new issues on that heritage have appeared, which could serve as a good basis for future research of particular traditional phenomena in Lika.

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