The place of the symbolic city in construction of national imagery: A case of Balkan folklore - two models of epic city

Abstract

This article is based on folklore studies of oral epic tradition in the Serb-Croat (or, depending on territory, Croat-Serbian) language which was common to the majority of former Yugoslavia population (in fact, all but Slovenes and Macedonians). The corpus of 1200 oral epic songs were chosen among other folklore genres because of their strong ideological position which made them the only form of oral literature where town appears as a human habitation clearly defined in time and space. In all other forms of traditional culture, the urban space is imagined and represented either as a miraculous or elfin place (as in fairy-tales, ritual poetry, short literary forms, et al), or as a notion with a name but without a content (as in etiological and other legends). In contrast, the epic poetry builds the image of urban space.