Original scientific paper
CROATIAN TRADITIONARY CULTURE AND LITERATURE IN PERIODICALS AND MONOGRAPHS FROM ROMANTICISM UP TO DATE
Marko Dragić
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split
Abstract
Croatian tradition culture and literature witness about the thirteen-century
life of the Croats. Folk rituals and customs, oral literature and the
language of the people that formed and handed it down, are the most
deserving for the preservation of the Croatian identity. In the tradition
culture and literature of the Croats one can observe the influences of Slavic
and other European peoples.
The first Croatian folklorist Petar Hektorović in his Fishing and Fishermen’s
Talk (1568) originally recorded two bugarshtitsas (popular quindecasyllabic
/ hexadecasyllabic ballads), three odes and one ballad. A more systematic
recording and study of the Croatian folk customs and oral literature
started in 1813 with “Circular” of the bishop of Zagreb, Maksimilijan
Vrhovec, who called to recording and gathering of oral literature and old
manuscripts. In 1877 the Central Croatian Cultural and Publishing Society
(Matica hrvatska) sent out a “Call for Gathering of Croatian Folk
Songs” and by December 1896 it had gathered 157 anthologies with more
than 24500 songs.
The oral literature of the Croats, as well as that of the Serbs and Bosniacs,
was admired and translated by many European philologists and writers,
such as: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Johannes
von Müller, brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Therese Albertine
Luise von Jacob under the pseudonym of Talvj, Prosper Mérimée, Walter
Scott, John Bowring, Adam Mickiewicz, Aleksandar Sergejevič Puškin,
Alphonse de Lamartine. The following people spent some time in Croatia,
Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia where they researched
oral literature: Alberto Fortis, Ludvik Kuba, Millman Parry, Albert Bates
Lord and others.
The Croatian tradition culture and literature experienced their new
flourishing in the early 1990s. Since that time up to our days some fifty
monographs from the Croatian ethnology and oral literature have been
published.
Keywords
ethnology; Croats; identity; folk rituals and customs; oral literature.
Hrčak ID:
230305
URI
Publication date:
3.12.2007.
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