Calendar Customs Research Articles

“Are You Quite Sure They Gave You Them All?”John Edward Crombie and the Personal Papers of the Rev. Walter Gregor (1825-97)

Regional studies, Aberdeenshire, Walter Gregor, Folk Lore Society, Folk-Lore Journal, New Spalding Club, John Edward Crombie, John William Crombie, Custom, Calendar Custom, Folk tale, Proverbs, Rites of passage, Fishing, Farming, Material culture, Scottish culture, Ethnology, Folklore

The cycle of pre-Christmas winter folk holidays as held in Western Podillya in Ukraine with the processes of urbanization and globalization in the background

Ukrainian culture has undergone significant urbanization and globalization influences in recent decades. Under the impact of these factors, the basic features and attributes of national identity which distinguish one cultural tradition from another are leveled and disappear. To a large extent, it applies to national traditions including winter ones, the functioning of which is actively fading and dying out. A comprehensive and especially regional study of winter traditions enhances the effect and importance of national culture in the context of European and world civilization in general. The article analyzes a cycle of winter folk holidays before Christmas in Western Podillya , examines the symbolism and main components of these holidays: The Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary into the Temple (known in Ukraine as Introduction (Vvedennia ), St. Andrew’s Day, St. Nicolas Day. Today, the traditional winter rituals of Western Podillya still retain their main components, although under the influence of modern globalisation and urbanisation processes, they are increasingly losing its original essence and colouring. During the first and second decades of the 21st century, the gap between the local town residents and the rural population has been steadily decreasing. In contrast to the period of the 20th century, when traditional rituals prevailed mainly in rural areas, currently they are mostly concentrated in cities, where various folkloristic societies, clubs, and theatres are active agents engaged in research, restoration and development of the traditions of our ancestors by preservation of the authenticity and essence of calendar customs and rites, reinterpreting them in a modern way, and explaining their meaning to the younger generation.

Representations of the Themes of Conflict and Peace within the Tradition of Well Dressing

This article explores the themes of conflict and peace as depicted within the English calendar custom of well dressing, a form of rural folk art where large tableaux are produced annually in the summer months using only natural materials pressed into a clay-filled board which is then sited at a local water source as an offering of gratitude for the essential gift of water. The custom is traditionally associated with the counties of Derbyshire and Staffordshire although it has spread further afield in recent years. The research includes both fieldwork (the author has been documenting the completed well dressings as well as their construction for a number of years, and in 2022 became a participant in the custom for the first time by joining the team of volunteer well dressers at the closest site to where he grew up) and study of archival sources including local newspaper reports to see how elements of the design process have changed over the years and been subject to influence by external trends.

ЛОКАЛЬНА СВОЄРІДНІСТЬ ГУЦУЛЬСЬКИХ ЗАГАДОК

Contemporary folklore studies require both new innovative approaches to the study of the modern genre of the Ukrainian folklore and comprehension, reprinting, as well as research of the works of folklorists of previous centuries. Given that riddles, as a genre of folklore, have attracted researchers’ attention within the context of studying other genre formations such as fairy tales, legends, folk lyrics, calendar customs, and family rituals, exploring the genre in various conceptual directions appears promising. Riddles were incorporated into compilations of the Ukrainian paroemias during the 1840s, often organized within distinct sections that typically lacked a formal classification framework. Scholarly exploration of the genre commenced in the latter half of the nineteenth century characterized by sporadic publications. The exploration of regional particularities in the formation of the riddle genre remains largely unexplored within the Ukrainian riddle studies predetermining comprehensive investigation. The article undertakes an examination of the texts extracted from the compilations of V. Shukhevych’s Hutsulshchyna (Vol. 5, 1908), H. Ilkevych’s Galician Proverbs and Riddles (1841), and M. Nomys’s Ukrainian Proverbs, Sayings, and so on (1864) aimed at discerning localized characteristics at the textual level excluding dialectal linguistic forms. The inquiry focuses on the analysis of congruences between the metaphorical components of textual questions in riddles documented in the Hutsul region and those found in riddles collected from other regions of Ukraine. The research yields the following conclusions. Riddles were prevalent across Ukraine exhibiting primarily universal elements alongside distinctive local traits. Consequently, the riddles documented in the Hutsul region manifest disparities across various dimensions, i.e. compositionally (via the original method of riddling involving the addition of a consistent opening to the text), lexically (through the use of dialectal expressions), and pertaining to a subject matter (notably encompassing riddles concerning indigenous flora, regional fauna denominations, tools, types of economic pursuits, and so forth).

ПРАЗДНИК ИВАНА КУПАЛЫ В ОМСКОМ ПРИИРТЫШЬЕ: ТРАДИЦИИ И НОВАЦИИ

The article, based on the materials collected by the author, describes the Kupol rituals, customs and beliefs that existed in the traditional culture of the East Slavic population of the Omsk region, their transformation into the Soviet and post-Soviet period, their actualization in modern times. It is concluded about the functioning of the Kupol traditions at present in two main forms - authentic and constructed. Factors of preservation and updating of calendar customs are called: partial preservation of faith in the magical power of rituals, performance of rituals for ethical reasons, awareness of the need to preserve traditions as the basis of the worldview, the activities of cultural and educational institutions, public organizations and the media.

Folklore of Ukrainian Prisoners of War of the Period of the First World War (After the Materials of the Phonogram Archives of the Austrian Academy of Sciences)

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of a large-scale anthropological project initiated in 1915 by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. It is provided, in particular, for the phonographic fixation of the examples of spoken language of war prisoners of various nationalities who fought on the side of the Russian Empire: Armenians, Jews, Latvians, Lithuanians, Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, etc. These audio recordings, kept in the Phonogram Archives of the Austrian Academy of Sciences for more than a century, have been introduced into scientific discourse in 2018. They are encrypted and transcribed into Latin. There are the examples of folklore culture of the Ukrainians provided by 17 informants from 8 governorates of the Russian Empire of that time: Chernihiv, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Poltava, Kherson, Katerynoslav, Volyn and Voronezh. Among the list of inhabited areas, where the Ukrainian informants are originated from, we come across the infamous names of the present-day Russian-Ukrainian war: Olenivka, Bakhmut (Donetsk region), Kupiansk (Kharkiv region). Recordings have been made during July–September, 1915 and in 1916 in the war prisoners’ camps in Freistadt (Austria), Reichenberg (now Liberec, the Czech Republic) and in the Vienna hospital. They have been initiated by the famous anthropologist Rudolf Pöch (1870–1921), a native of Ternopil. He has been assisted by the Vienna language expert Hans Pollak (1885–1976) and the Ukrainian linguist and folklore specialist Ivan Pankevych (1887–1958), a graduate of the University of Vienna. Using the phonograph, these researchers have recorded the folk texts of different genres: the Cossack prayers, songs of literary origin, fairy tales (about animals and of novelistic nature), jokes, stories about the summer cycle calendar customs (in particular, about the women ritual dinner called bryksy) and dreams. The characteristic feature of these texts consists of the transformation of the song-like narrative into a prose; they are a valuable field material not only for the folklore specialists, but also for historians and linguists. Audio-recordings, provided by the Ukrainian war prisoners, form a part of 1899–1950s collection of the Phonogram Archives of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and are included into the UNESCO Register of Documentary Heritage Memory of the World / Memory of Humanity.

The Summoning: Folk Horror and the Calendar Custom in Molly Aitken’s the Island Child (2020) and Zoe Gilbert’s Folk (2019)

ABSTRACT The UK has a rich calendar of folkloric traditional customs that continue to occur in our communities, even when their purpose is archaic or unknown. Folk Horror is most associated with cinema and television, and filmmakers consciously use calendar customs as a “summoning,” to epitomize the horror of the landscape, the isolation of the characters and their “skewed moral beliefs” (Scovell, “The Folk Horror Chain”). Though Folk Horror scholarship is new and emerging, this paper aims to interrogate whether two works of contemporary literary fiction, The Island Child by Molly Aitken (2020) and Folk by Zoe Gilbert (2019), could be considered Folk Horror, and how their respective employment of the calendar custom as a narrative device impacts the text.

САД І ПЛОДОВІ ДЕРЕВА У СВІТОГЛЯДІ БАЛТІВ

The aim of the article is to explore the expression of garden and fruit trees growing therein in the Baltic worldview on the basis of the data from the 16th–17th centuries. written sources, such as folklore texts of various genres, calendar customs and family holiday traditions, as well as through the customs, folklore and beliefs of the neighbouring Slavic peoples. The first reliable data on individual fruit trees or gardens were recorded in written monuments only in early 16th century. By the end of the 16th century, gardens had been already present not only in monasteries, but also in manors and parsonages. The time of cultivation of gardens more or less coincides with the mention of deities patronizing gardens (Kirnis, Mother of Gardens, Bibcziu Bobelis) in written monuments. Even though fruit trees were still very rare in the homesteads of the poor in the middle of the 19th century, many different beliefs, magical acts, prohibitions, which aimed to ensure that the planted fruit trees grow well and have a harvest, were recorded late 19th – early 20th centuries. Gardens and individual fruit trees became important symbols of calendar and family holidays as well as folklore texts that were used to express the ideas of fertility, marriage, birth, and death. Some of the beliefs and magical acts related to garden trees were probably borrowed, from other countries (Greeks, Romans, Slavs) at various times, while part of the symbolic meanings comes from the archetypal tree concept common to all Baltic peoples.

ЕТНОЛИНГВИСТИЧЕН ПОГЛЕД КЪМ ЛЕКСИКАТА НА ТРАДИЦИОННАТА НАРОДНА КУЛТУРА НА БЪЛГАРИТЕ МЮСЮЛМАНИ ОТ КСАНТИЙСКО/AN ETHNOLINGUISTIC VIEW OF THE LEXIS OF THE TRADITIONAL FOLK CULTURE OF THE MUSLIM BULGARIANS FROM XANTHI

The article examines individual fragments of the traditional folk culture and the corresponding dialect vocabulary of Muslim Bulgarians from Northern Greece, Xanthi, through the prism of ethnolinguistics. The author, who is a representative of the Moscow Ethnolinguistic School founded by academician N. I. Tolstoy, explores culture as an overall picture of the world in the unity of all its forms – verbal (dictionary and folk-lore texts), actional (rituals) and mental (beliefs). On the basis of expedition materials collected personally in 2018–2019, the author sketches the current cultural and linguistic situation in the region, which is characterized by multilingualism. Special attention is paid to the terminology belonging to the sphere of calendar customs and folk mythology. So far, the author has come to the conclusion that the analyzed customs and beliefs, as well as their vocabulary, are a multi-layered and multicultural phenomenon including archaic linguistic relics and Christian and Muslim representations and symbols, which interact with each other, creating the unique cultural mosaic of the Southern Rhodopes. Keywords: ethnolinguistics, dialect vocabulary, folk culture, Muslim Bulgarians, Northern Greece

The Folklore of the Calendar Customs (Spring, Summer, Autumn) Recorded in The Digitized Collections of Ethnographic and Folkloric Materials

The article informs and provides an analysis on the qualitative and quantitative level of the data regarding the folklore of the calendar customs (spring, summer, autumn), which were digitized within the project Saving the Folkloric Archival Material Preserved in Chisinau, Republic of Moldova (EAP1045). Transgressed from the classic archiving format to the digitized one, the manuscripts and cassette tapes offer us valuable information gathered between 1956-1992, with reference to the folklore of the feasts celebrated in the warm season of the year, as well as of the customs, social, ceremonial and ritual practices, beliefs and mythical representations associated with them. Evaluating the consistency of documenting these folkloric and ethnographic expressions in the archival materials, we noticed inequalities and prioritizations in their recording and researching, the attention of the folclorists being visibly diffused towards other genres of folklore.

Ethnofolkloric aspects of the Mehedinți area – vernacular architecture and ‘nedeia’ celebrations

Mehedinţi County impresses with the specificity of its traditions, with its heritage that speaks of a time of peace and order, through a horizon full of special symbolism. The study is organized on two coordinates with the intention of briefly presenting the issues addressed. , On the one hand, the elements of ethnography of traditional housing will be analyzed, on the other hand, it is intended to present some aspects of authentic Romanian spirituality manifested in the area of Mehedinţi, that of the local ‘nedei’. Regarding the ethnographic aspects of the traditional house, an attempt will be made to create a typology of houses with vernacular architecture in Mehedinți County, as well as to mention their conservation and restoration actions in the conditions of contemporary research. Among the calendar customs specific to the area, the most spectacular are the ‘nedeile’, because they represent the meeting between an ancient pre-Christian substratum with certain holidays and / or church feasts, i. e. with the Christian religion. The distinction between fairs and ‘nedeile’ will be discussed extensively, bringing arguments selected from specialized bibliography. At the same time, the important role of the ‘Iron Gates’ Museum from Drobeta Turnu Severin will be mentioned in the conservation and patrimonialization of the material and immaterial culture specific to the Mehedinți ethnographic region.

Can Calendar Customs Engender Stewardship of Our Natural Environment? An Investigation into Real-world and Fictional Calendar Customs in the UK and Their Potential for Environmental Engagement

ABSTRACT Many UK communities perform a custom in the same place at the same time every year, and a number of these, such as the Marsden Imbolc Fire Festival in West Yorkshire, The Saddleworth Rushcart in Greater Manchester, and the well-dressing tradition, have a direct connection to the natural world, through the theme that underpins them, the natural resources used and the ways in which they can contribute to a sense of ‘place attachment’. As awareness grows in advocating for local, as opposed to global, climate change messaging to increase engagement and action among citizens, could calendar customs offer a previously unexplored opportunity for community engagement in the face of climate crisis? This paper uses qualitative research with the organisers of three calendar customs alongside representations of calendar customs in fiction to interrogate the impact calendar customs could make in their respective communities.

The Fishermen’s Luck: The Maritime Clavie and Its Variants

The Burning of the Clavie is a calendar custom traditionally associated with the ancient Pictish seaport of Burghead, but fishermen in north-east Scotland had their own ‘needfire’ version of the Clavie, used to instantly remedy spells of poor catches believed to have been caused by evil spirits, witches, or other forms of ill-luck. This article aims to delineate the maritime or fishermen’s Clavie as a reactive ritual rather than a calendar custom. The Clavie will be compared against other beliefs held and rituals re-enacted by the fishing communities, demonstrating that the fishermen had a specific set of ‘crisis’ rituals thought to rid them of ill-luck at sea. This article also offers, by its use of oral reminiscence, a snapshot of the contemporary belief concerning the Clavie found in mid twentieth- to early twenty-first-century fishermen in north-east Scotland and Shetland.

Contemporary Religious Practices of the Orthodox Chuvash in the Samara Trans-Volga region

The paper focuses on contemporary religious practices of the Orthodox Chuvash living in the Trans-Volga areas of the Samara Region. The author describes features of the ritual calendar, funeral and memorial customs and rituals, forms of social activity of the Chuvash within the framework of religious life; reveals the ratio of Orthodox and the so-called pagan elements in religious practices; traces the process of formation of Orthodox-pagan syncretism as the basis of contemporary religiosity of the Samara Chuvash. The results of the study showed their noticeable shift towards Orthodox religiosity in the last two decades. Orthodoxy acts as the basis of the confessional identity of the Samara Chuvash and today it determines activity in the formation of the sacred landscape of Chuvash villages. Orthodoxy is at the heart of festive and ceremonial culture, religious actions and experience. However, in contemporary religious practices, especially in funeral, memorial and calendar rituality, rituals and behavioral models that go back to the Chuvash religion are manifested. At the same time, there is a high degree of syncretization of Orthodox and Chuvash folk traditions, due to the long history of their coexistence in the culture of the rural community. Local churches and involvement of villagers in the confessional environment both at the local, regional and national levels play a significant role in the formation and development of religious practices.

Connected through Custom: Well Dressing in Jon McGregor’s Novel, Reservoir 13

Placing a calendar custom in a fictional text opens a wealth of possibilities to the writer: enabling new plots or changes in trajectories; signposting critical information about place and pace, time and timing; and conveying and communicating complex characters. In Reservoir 13, a novel by Jon McGregor, the custom of well dressing appears not as superfluous detail, but as an intentional device to control and manipulate the text—and the reader’s response to it. Although the mentions of the custom are fleeting, this article demonstrates how its inclusion, and its frequency of use, enables the writer to develop a sophisticated sense of place and distinctive, memorable characters through a few well-chosen words. The custom also aids readers in their navigation through a structure which could otherwise prove difficult to fathom, while simultaneously grounding the characters in their calendar when collective trauma may provoke feelings of detachment and isolation.

DISEASE DEMONS IN THE TRADITIONAL HUTSULS OUTLOOK OF ETHNO-HISTORICAL TRANSCARPATHIA (BY THE FIELD MATERIALS)

In this article was outlined the wide range of hutsulsfolk demonical characters of ethno-historical Transcarpathia –disease demons (plague, cholera, tetyukha etc.) On the basis of considerable amounts of the filed, archival and literary sources carried through historical-ethnographic reconstruction of traditional demonical world-view in disease demons among hutsuls of ethno-historical Transcarpathia.The genesis of a whole series of demonic images have been seen about and the local features of the names of the demoniacs have been identified and the demonic motives. The traditional concept was revealed and the hutsuls belief about chatracteristic figures tracked, their main features, functions and properties. The protection ways and charms against harmful actions was considered. Was found that the most of such belief date bake to ancient times and the remains of the archaic hutsuls world-view with of different in value and origin a variety of the phenomena of ancient and modern tradition and the significant influence of church canons. The genesis of researched demonic character, their anthropomorphic and zoomorphic hypostasis, various manifestations and supernatural abilities have been considered. The wide range of apotropic rituals directed on the protection against to harmful actions of demonic characters (magic practices using plants like amulet, the process of keeping the ritual bans, rituals related with the cultivation of lands around), calendar customs related with the funeral and protection motives have been investigated. For neutralization of disease demon applied fasting and prayer as a protect, seeking magical help from a priest, the use of sanctified water, poppy seed with the apotropical aim etc. Together with the reconstruction of the ancient demonical hutsuls belief of ethno –historical Transcarphatia a modern state of the traditional demonical concept protection and living and related with them ritual actions have been investigated.

THE FOLKLORIC ELEMENTS IN THE G. BASHIROV’S WORKS

The article is devoted to the study of folkloric elements in the works of Tatar writer of the second half of the twentieth century, Gumer Bashirov. Verbal folklore reflects the spiritual world of the people, its ideals and dreams, values of life, centuries-old creative experience of the people, language features, poetic idea of the world. Also, folklore is unique in its form and content, themes and subjects, which attract writers and poets. In the works, which depicts the spiritual world, the way of life of the people, their rural life, the use of folk traditions and elements is an integral part of the work of art. In the Tatar village prose, which includes the work of the studied writer, in order to reflect the Tatar life in the countryside, elements of family and household and calendar customs are often included in the skeleton of the work. In this work, the objects of study are the folklorisms used in Bashirov’s autobiographical novel "My homeland is a green cradle." The aim of the study is identifying and studying of switching the function of the folkloric elements in the studied novel. The author sees one of the purposes for writing this novel is in the preservation of Tatar folk customs, rituals, traditional foundations of rural life and language specifics. The study enables to conclude that the autobiographical novel "My homeland is a green cradle" by G. Bashirov has prominently many examples of Tatar verbal folklore. The author uses almost all the main genres of Tatar folklore: fairy tales, tales and legends, song folklore and baits (lyrical epic), small genres – proverbs, sayings, omens, winged words, good wishes, curses, conspiracies, oaths, as well as family and household and calendar customs that existed in the early twentieth century.

Everyday Meals in Regency London

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Div a zázrak v mayských poutích do Esquipulas

The study deals with pilgrimages to Esquipulas, Guatemala, and patterns of miracle in terms of their perception by the pilgrims reaching this prominent religious hub of Central America. Two key pilgrimage discourses are distinguished: traditional Maya pilgrimage, based on regular, calendar customs, and conventional Catholic pilgrimage, founded on occasional journeys to fulfil a vow. The Western understanding of miracle as a transgression of “natural laws” or “common course of nature” is relativized and contested arguing that the ethnographic evidence of Esquipulas shows not only different, but also opposite conceptions. Then, the study presents a spectrum of miracle ideas drawing from the Maya as well as European – the case of Lourdes is exemplary here – traditions in terms of the degree of their uncommonness. It is concluded that anthropology has to comprehend miracles as marvels in its cultural context; nevertheless, there is a widespread idea among many cultures that miracle is something wonderful, related to the awareness of non-obviousness of certain things and phenomena. Miracles find its content and meaning within particular cosmology, but, anchored in the psychological characteristics of the astonishment and the difference between usual and unusual or ordinary and extraordinary, they refer to features of human mind in a more general way.

Cyril I. Paton and the Editorship of Manx Calendar Customs (1942)

Manx Calendar Customs published by The Folk-Lore Society in 1942 did not have a smooth path to publication. Surviving correspondence between Cyril Ingram Paton and M. M. Banks shows that several editors were considered before Paton and work was underway before his appointment. The precarious financial status of The Society also delayed its appearance.