Original scientific paper
New Year's eve in Croatian traditional culture
Marko Dragić
orcid.org/0000-0001-5362-6814
; Faculty of Philosophy, University of Split
Abstract
Saint Sylvester I as a bishop lived to see numerous tortures and
executions of Christians. In year 313 he baptized the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, and that was the year when the Emperor
proclaimed freedom of Christianity.
The feast of saint Sylvester is on December 31
st
. Croatians call
that day Silvestrovo, and also in Dalmatia Savistrovo. However, in
professional and scientific literature there are just a few lines written about that day. Thus, in this paper the legends about saint Sylvester and the baptism of Emperor Constantine the Great with over
twenty original field notes on customs, rituals, processions, beliefs,
divinations and carol processions and songs related to New Year’s
Eve in Croatian cultural heritage are listed and multidisciplinary
interpreted. Those notes were taken in the period between 2007 and
2013 in the Republic of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Out of
twenty tellers, the oldest was born in 1921, only two of them were
under the age of sixty, and all the others were over eighty years old.
That warns and obliges us to write down and record the examples of
cultural heritage before oblivion takes that treasure of our ancestors
from us and our descendants. The listed examples have an exceptional social and aesthetical significance.
Keywords
religious rituals; processions; apotropaic rituals; carol processions and songs; divinations
Hrčak ID:
141351
URI
Publication date:
14.7.2015.
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