Original scientific paper
GESUNKENES GETRUNKENES KULTURGUT: THE WINE STATUTES UNDER THE ANCIENT ROOFS
Ivan Lozica
; Institute of Ethnology and folklore research, Zagreb
Abstract
The author has been inspired by the idea of Dunja Rihtman-Augustin that emphasizes the need of researching both present and past everyday life throughout the social strata. The theme of the paper are the wine statutes and table customs in northern Croatia -- the traditional phenomenon that has been ignored by the scientific writings but is very much present in art literature. The statutes, as well as the wine associations, have escaped from the attention of classical, historically based ethnological (and folklore, too) research which had dealt mainly with the peasant culture. The wine statutes are "somewhere in-
between" even today — although their origin could make them a part of European Latin Middle Ages, in Croatia they found their sinking way from the manor-houses, through bourgeois homes, to the peasant houses, wine-huts and today's weekend cottages as gesunkenes Kulturgut.. They can be found as a part of living Martinmas custom of baptising must, and as a part of a renewed tradition and tourist hotel attraction. The author follows the echoes of the wine statutes and wine associations in writings (and partly also in lives) of four great Croatian poets and prose-writers of nineteenth and twentieth centuries: romantic-realistic poet and prose-writer August Senoa (1838—1881), best known for themes from Croatian history; one of the rare noblemen among the Croatian realist writers, Ksaver Sandor Gjalski (1854—1934), whose short stories owe a lot to Turgenev, but also offer a detailed picture of everyday noblemen country world in the region of Hrvatsko Zagorje; then the greatest modernist writer - an aesthete, cosmopolitan and enfant terrible Antun Gustav Matos (1873 — 1914), and finally Miroslav Krleza (1893 —1981), an erudite, leftist, and best-known Croatian writer of the 20th century, the author of the matchless kaikavian ballads Balade Petrice Kerempuha.. By trailing the excerpts from literary works, but also by having insight into scientific, popular and other publications, the author manages to sketch roughly the history of the wine statutes and drinking associations in northern Croatia, since the founding of the elitist aristocratic association Pinta in 1696, throughout the bourgeois stage of the invention of tradition during the last decades of the last and the beginning of this century, different editions of the prominent Krizevacki staluti, the attitude towards the wine customs and statutes during the socialist period, until the latest publishing undertakings and attempts of renewing bourgeois and aristocratic wine values that took place during the last couple of years. Having noted the pronounced processes of interweaving of two cultures, the constantly ambivalent position of wine statutes in changing "official" systems of social values, and having in mind the parody, "laughing" and "carnivalesque" character of the statutes, the author leans against the M. M. Bakhtin's and O. M. Frejdenberg's thesis, pleading for the more liberate perception of popular culture, according to which it would no more be defined only by stratum or class.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
45109
URI
Publication date:
19.12.1996.
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