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The sacred fire, often called living fire or new fire continued to be kindled in sheepfolds from Moldavia and Bukovina up to the second half of the last century. The article is based on archive information and investigates each characteristic of this practice: who could make the living fire, how they were allowed to start the fire, the time to kindle it and the purpose of the fire. Comparisons with similar aspects from international folk culture underline a common perception on the discovery that shaped the history of human civilization. The approach uses linguistic, historical proofs as well as methods and arguments pertaining to cultural anthropology to reveal a millennium old fascination encapsulated in folk practices and beliefs.
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Unanimously, the Romanian historians and ethnologists agree that the origins of the Romanian folk costume are Thracian/Dacian. But, until now, they have studied the Romanian folk costume strictly from the perspective of the belief that only the Romanians are descendants of the Thracians and Romans, without a comparative analysis of all the folk costumes from the former Thracian space and of the costumes of the people formed on the territory of the Roman Empire. Therefore, it has been overlooked that since the conquest of Dacia, the popular costume of the Daco-Romans and of the Romanians has been massively influenced by the Roman civil and military costume, such as the apron and the embroidery on the shoulders of the women blouses or the costume of the Călușari dancers. However, the Roman influence caused the popular port in a large part of the Thracian space (the provinces of Thrace, Moesia, Dacia and Illyricum) and acquired distinct features from the ethnographic areas specific to the free Dacians. It is also noticed that there are two other major ethnographic areas in the territory of the Dacians who remained outside the Roman Empire. Thus, in the northwest of the province of Dacia, a distinct ethnographic area was formed, which is characterized by the short shirt and wide skirts of the men, while the women’s folk costume was strongly influenced by the folk costume of the Roman Empire. The defining features of the men’s costume seem to have been influenced by the clothing of some Central European populations, especially from the Middle Ages. On the other hand, another major ethnographic area is extremely conservative, as it has preserved the archaic structure of the male and female costume of the Dacians as it is illustrated on Trajan’s Column and the Adamclisi Monument. This distinct ethnographic area roughly corresponds to the mountain areas on both sides of the Eastern and Southern Carpathians, as well as the largest part of the territory of Moldavia, from Pokuttia to southern Bessarabia. At the same time, in all these ethnographic areas, including the south of Danube, a piece of popular port (a special pleated skirt) can be found sporadically (discontinuously on the Romanian territory) that can be attributed to the migration of the Slavs to this part of Europe.
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Valoroasa şi bogata Arhivă de Folclor a Moldovei şi Bucovinei ni se revelă încă o dată, la cei cincizeci de ani de la înfiinţare, printr-o nouă carte, semnată de doi eminenţi reprezentanţi ai ei, Silvia Ciubotaru şi Ion H. Ciubotaru, Cântece propriu-zise din Moldova (Editura Universităţii „Alexandru Ioan Cuza” din Iaşi, 2021, 460 p. + C.D). O carte densă, care are toate componentele necesare ilustrării temei pe care şi-a ales-o. Cuvântul înainte precizează de ce a fost preferată sintagma cântece „propriu-zise” celei de „cântece lirice”: „Este mai riguroasă, în sensul că elimină ambiguităţile generate de prezenţa sporadică a unor elemente epice şi, în plus, evită pleonasmul, chiar dacă acesta este cunoscut şi acceptat tacit de toată lumea”.
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On the occasion of the centenary of King Ferdinand and Queen Mary’s coronation in Alba-Iulia, on October, 15, 1922, following the Great Union of 1918 which placed Romania within the borders of nowadays (except for Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, provinces lost in 1944), we are bringing to light the testimonies of those who participated during the First World War in the battles of Mărășești and Oituz, in the summer of 1917, recorded and preserved in the folklore archive. At the same time, the impact of the war on the collective consciousness determined the creation of songs which evoke war stories. The soldier’s song, known as “The song of the one dying on the front”, which evokes the soldier who fought both in the Balkans, in 1877, and in the Carpathians, in 1916, represents the leitmotif of these lament songs, folk and erudite creations with powerful patriotic accents. The most popular songs of the kind date back to the First World War. The battles of the Second World War were evoked in folk songs, such as the battles on the Dniester, of Odessa or Stalingrad, but failed to be published and were subject to the ideological censorship of the Communist regime, still being preserved in the collections and the recordings of the folklore archive.
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During the first two weeks of August 2022, the Wooden Churches Association, in partnership with several associations, among which Moldavia’s Ethnographic Museum, carried out a research and inventory campaign of wooden churches in Iasi county. During the week I was present there, the research focused on the wooden churches in Costești, Târgu Frumos, Șcheia, Ciurbești, Ipatele and Zlodica. The article presents the main characteristics of the churches under study, as well as the situation in the field, suggesting at the same time directions of action in order to preserve these folk art edifices, as well as the surrounding environment.
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In this article, the author presents information related to the ethnography collection within the “Paul Ţarălungă” Museum Complex from the village of Prăjeşti, Bacău county. The Museum Complex in the village of Prăjeşti was established in 1971 through the efforts of Paul Ţarălungă, who was a special man, a valued and respected teacher. He was the right man in the right place. Through hard work, without restraint, he managed to establish one of the richest and most valuable village museums in the country and a Botanical Garden, unique in Bacău county and among the few existing in the country. The current “Paul Ţarălungă” Museum Complex in the village of Prăjeşti, Bacău county, includes exhibits of ethnography, archaeology, numismatics, zoology, paleontology, botany, geology, grouped thematically in a specially designed building, next to a botanical garden. In the museum building, the exhibits are arranged in eight rooms, of which three are dedicated to popular cultural heritage values. The ethnographic collection exhibited in the three exhibition halls includes valuable objects (folk costumes; household items; traditional agricultural tools), coming mainly from the geographical area of the local rural space.
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Borten (the hat made of black velvet) belongs to the category of folk costume accessories of the Saxon woman in Transylvania – present in all communities and mainly obeying the same paradigm. In this study, we want to present the woman's metamorphosis from child to adult, through the symbolism of head adorning element, mainly the manufacture of borten, its function, and the completion of the cycle by reaching the next stage in life, the adult married woman identified through vălitura placed on her head. We want to show all of this through seven bortene selected from ASTRA Museum’s collection. Through this overview, we learn that this ritualistic hat was inherited from the German community. It is an item that adapts to the religious and memorial requirements. Stories describing acts of courage are associated with borten. They impose a strict moral conduct that must be obeyed by the person wearing it. It is assigned to an age of transition, from the innocence of the adolescence to the responsibility of adulthood. It is associated with the search and creation of individual moral character through the understanding of rules, and through the acknowledgment of those rules that reflect society’s expectations. The symbolic moment when one stops wearing borten and takes on vălitura represents a child's loss of innocence, and stepping into a new life stage, that of married woman who will embrace motherhood in the future.
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Pe Cornel Bucur este foarte greu să-l asemui altuia dintre cei cunoscuţi mie. Şi, har Domnului! – am avut răgaz mare să număr mai mulţi semeni între cunoscuţii mei, îndeosebi cei din „lumea” muzeelor şi a monumentelor, arheologi, istorici, etnografi, oameni de artă sau din sfera ştiinţelor, restauratori, arhitecţi, biologi…
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Celor 56 de piese pe care le-am tipărit în numărul trecut al anuarului, le adăugăm acum încă 71, culese de Petru Caraman de la aceiaşi ostaşi surprinşi de sfârşitul Primului Război Mondial prin câteva sate din părţile Covurluiului, învecinate cu Vârlezii, locul de baştină al autorului. Majoritatea cântecelor puse acum în circulaţie provin din Turceşti şi Drăgăşani – Vâlcea, Gogoşii de Pădure şi Cetate – Dolj, Brânceni – Teleorman, Lunca Corbului – Argeş, Moscu – Galaţi ş.a. Printre cei de la care s-au cules, se numără şi lăutarul doljean Petre Nistor, un remarcabil păstrător al cântecelor bătrâneşti, în repertoriul său figurând şi un important florilegiu de balade clasice, unele dintre acestea fiind incluse în volumul de Literatură populară al lui Petru Caraman, publicat în anul 1982.
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Review of: Mall Hiiemäe. Virumaa kalendripärimus. Eesti Kirjandusmuuseum, Eesti Rahvaluule Arhiiv. Tartu– Rakvere: EKM Teaduskirjastus, 2018. 282 lk.
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During the Second Congress of the Association of Music Folklorists of Yugoslavia, held on Bjelašnica in 1955, associates of the Institute of Ethnomusicology in Ljubljana made sound recordings of various forms of music performed by the local population. The recordings were made with the Magnemite Portable 610 C portable field tape recorder, which was a rarity in ethnomusicological fieldwork at the time. Such a recorder enabled in situ recording, because it did not need to be connected to the electrical network, which gives the recordings a special authenticity and documentary value. The peculiarity of these recordings lies in the fact that they were recorded during the teferič in the small village of Umoljani in Bjelašnica, i.e. in their original context. For more than half a century, these unique recordings have been almost forgotten. Thanks to the cooperation of the Institute of Ethnomusicology of the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the Institute of Musicology of the Music Academy of the University of Sarajevo, the recordings have once again become a subject of interest for academics. This paper aims to point out the first experiences of researchers with portable field tape recorders, the importance of new technologies for ethnomusicological research, as well as the importance of these recordings for ethnomusicological research in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
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The article Arcadie Suceveanu, Carolling examines the creative initiative of the eponymous poet not only to rethink a species of the folk poetry, but also to re-anchor the author’s poetry of Bassarabia and Bucovina in the deep waters of Tradition, of a tradition long disputed by the communist officials.
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Miorita’s previous researchers analyzed it as a diverse fact and as an exoteric text. Previous research was done with methodological errors, inadmissible in science today. I analyze Miorita as a mythological and esoteric text and with a new methodology, no longer used. The result of my research is diametrically opposed to the result of previous research.
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The article discusses female costume from the Early Iron Age period at Glasinac. For this purpose, graves from tumuli in Podilijak, Ilijak and Pešter, which on the basis of characteristic jewellery can be defined as female, have been analysed. Anthropological analyses further revealed that among these female graves there are also infant or girl interments, which particularly stand out as regards their costumes, rich in jewellery. Our research demonstrated that the female costume was not uniform, but rather varied. Moreover, it appears that the costume had been specific and designative of social status of single female individuals within the framework of their family/clan communities and can accordingly be seen as reflecting the social role of these females.
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The place name Kungla has become known in Estonia due to Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald’s (1803-1882) records of folklore and his own folklore-based works. In Kreutzwald’s writings it designates a mysterious ancient land of plenty or a place where people once used to live in peace and happiness. The toponym Kungla can be found in his records of folklore that he forwarded to A. H. Neus, in the epic Kalevipoeg that he created on the basis of runosongs and folktales, and in his literary fairy tales. The name of Kungla as denoting a national romantic homeland has become even more widely known thanks to the popular song “Kungla rahvas” (“The people of Kungla”) by composer K. A. Hermann and poet Friedrich Kuhlbars. In connection with Kungla the article seeks answers to two questions: (1) Could the concept that has become more widely know thanks to Kreutzwald have been found in popular usage in runosongs and fairytales or is it Kreutzwald’s own creation presented by him as being used by the people? (2) Where could Kungla’s geographical location be situated, be it either a popular concept or one of the author’s own creation? Although the bulk of Estonian folklore collections derive from a later period than Kreutzwald’s works, it can still be claimed both on the basis of folk tales and runosongs that Kungla would not have been a concept generally known among the people and it is highly likely that the notion was coined by Kreutzwald. In his correspondence with Baltic-German linguist F. A. Schiefner Kreutzwald himself suggested that a possible location for Kungla could be the island of Gotland, described in a chronicle as a prosperous land rich in gold. In addition to this hypothesis, based on the similarities of certain place names, later scholars have suggested some locations within Estonia. Thus, the notion of Kungla that has become generally known through Kreutzwald’s works has become folklorised and, as a national romantic neotoponym, it has reached the labels of various products, names of collectives and establishments, as well as the actual geographical map.
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The author of this article recently published in the Godišnjak a short discussion, which provided chronological and contextual reinterpretation of a stone fragment with human face from the collection of the Franciscan Monastery of St. Anthony of Padua on Humac in Ljubuški (Hercegovina). It was argued that the fragment represents part of an image (idol) originally depicting early medieval old Slavic gods, most likely Veles or Perun. The article also discussed earlier published information and archaeological material from the region of Ljubuški, that further suggests presence of mythology and old Slavic beliefs in Herzegovina. On this occassion, when we celebrate 50th volume of one of the most respected and influential journals in a field in the Bosnia and Herzegovina, the enquiry will focus on neighbouring area of Mostar, where is also possible to find evidence that can be connected with the period of the Slav settlement and its aftermath.
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The article is focused on the research career of ethnologist Aliise Moora (1900-1996) in a changing society. The material is drawn from Moora’s research papers and the archival collections of the Estonian National Museum (including the materials personally collected by Moora), her work reports and correspondence, but also on various documents reflecting the activities of the museum. A closer look is given to her complicated adaptation to Stalinist cultural policy in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The authors analyse Moora’s way of text creation as well as how she worked with various (ethnographic) sources and how she used linguistic material in her studies of food culture. Her two most influential studies Peipsimaa etnilisest ajaloost (On the ethnic history of Peipsimaa, 1964) and Eesti talurahva vanem toit (Historical food of the Estonian peasantry, 1980, 1991) are discussed in more detail. After World War II Aliise Moora worked as research secretary of the Estonian National Museum, essentially performing the duties and bearing the responsibilities of its manager. In the late 1940s, due to Stalinist cultural policy, she fell out of favour, being demoted from the leading position of research secretary to a junior researcher. The condition for staying at the museum was intensive political further education. Nevertheless, Moora maintained an influential and authoritative position in Estonian cultural studies for the rest of her life. In her studies Moora used not only her self-collected comprehensive fieldwork materials, but also different types of other sources, including linguistic materials. Despite the methodological and thematic deficiencies of Soviet ethnographic research, Aliise Moora’s results on ethnic history and food culture are in no way inferior to those of her contemporary anthropologists, ethnologists and folklorists in the West.
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The population census of 2011 in Romania counted almost 40,000 members of the German minority, one third of which living in the area formerly inhabited by the Transylvanian Saxons. However, we encounter youth dance groups wearing the traditional national costumes at various cultural events or folk festivals. At the beginning of 2022 there were nine youth folk dance groups with regular activity in eight Transylvanian towns, alongside many groups with temporary activity on various occasions in German language nursery schools or schools. The specialist literature on the registration and preservation of the Transylvanian Saxon immaterial heritage or reports on cultural life has devoted less attention to folk dances than to other elements of the Saxon cultural heritage such as folk songs, linguistic varieties and peculiarities, fairy tales and legends, respectively choirs, brass bands and theatre groups. This study is an approach to the issue of the preservation of the traditional Transylvanian-Saxon folk dances by the youth groups in Transylvania. The aim of our research was to find out who the members of such youth folk dance groups are (their ethnic and cultural background), their perception of this tradition and their motivation to learn, practise and hand down this tradition.
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