The place of
folktales and folklore
in Bulgarian culture
Folklore has been occupying a central place in the national consciousness of Bulgarians since the beginning of time. Mythologies and stories about normal and fantastical people have been used through the ages to transfer the community’s belief and value system through oral storytelling. Then during the 19th century, as the Bulgarian Revival was blossoming, the interest in cultural and ethnographic endeavors was rising. There was a substantial effort to collect, write, and analyze that folklore by evident writers and scholars like Kuzman Shapkarev and Yordan Kovachev (Stoykova, 2001). Shapkarev’s collection, Sbornik ot balgarski narodni umotvoreniya (Collection of works of the popular Bulgarian spirit) that came out in the mid-20th century contains an invaluable account of 1300 songs, rituals, customs, rites, and beliefs, spread across four volumes. The 19th century was a pivotal moment in Bulgarian history as it was marked by the collapse of the Ottoman empire and thus the end of the Ottoman occupation. This sudden surge in cultural curiosity can be attributed to the desire to find the Bulgarian national identity and consciousness that needed to be formed, now that Bulgaria became an autonomous territory (Stoykova, 2001). Ivanichka Georgieva (1983) provided a synthesized account of those efforts in her book, Bulgarian National Mythology. Georgieva outlines the significance of mythology and folklore for the people occupying the land of Bulgaria today and pays attention to repetitive motifs and how their meaning has changed through the ages. Her work is an incredible resource for seeing trends across folklore items, especially when it comes to mythical characters like samodivas (featured in the animation), dragons, creation stories, etc. As these topics were of interest to me in the earlier stages of my project, I engaged with them a lot, but as the attention started shifting more towards gender relationships in those stories, I got back to her and focused primarily on her findings about samodivas and the general place of folklore in Bulgarian consciousness.Folklore was crucial for the creation of national consciousness in Bulgaria. Its core values of hard work, love for the family, and being brave and honest resonate in people’s minds until today. The project of creating a coherent Bulgarian national identity that lies on those values has been undertaken both during the Revival period (while Bulgaria was still under Ottoman occupation) and later during the Socialist regime, with some questionable decisions, but effective nevertheless.
Folklore, oddly paired with the Christian belief system, was the last straw to hold Bulgarians as a community between the 15 and 19 century. As Angelov (1995) mentions, the first folklore collections from the end of the 19th century show that the song and narrative folklore was used to process the everyday lives of people in Bulgarian villages, as they were working, building families and “trying to stay safe”. Even though the intensity of the Ottoman occupation is quite questionable, the written folklore showcases the severe “us vs. them” mentality that was being spread around through songs and traditional dances. The big juxtaposition between “the dark scary Turk” versus the “white tiny kind Buglarian girl”. Regardless of the presence of the Ottoman Empire, Bulgarian folklore seems to rely heavily on the moral superiority of hard work, honesty and selflessness. These values conveniently translated to the Socialist ideals a few decades later and many of them live until today. It is important to note that it is very possible that this continuity is this evident just because the Socialist regime could have successfully wiped out everything that doe s not support their agenda. Even now, many of those values continue to be circulate through school literature and widely accessible children’s books.
As we are acknowledging the omnipresence and importance of folklore throughout time and space, it is important to think about the assumptions that are built into Bulgarian identity to achieve those values. More specifically, let’s talk about gender roles and the place of women and men in the world of folklore. To achieve that, we will take a look at the kinds of stories that guide a young person’s relationship with folklore, i.e. the school literature curriculum, where there are over 100 folklore bits spanning throughout the entire mandatory schooling years
The relevance of folklore today seems to be primarily lingering from the Revival and the socialist efforts of the 20th century. Nevertheless, the characters and the stereotypes they represent linger in the collective consciousness and serve as a good guiding point when we talk about gender roles.