http://www.balkaninstitut.com KURBAN IN THE BALKANS http://www.balkaninstitut.com SRPSKA AKADEMIJA NAUKA I UMETNOSTI BALKANOLO[KI INSTITUT POSEBNA IZDAWA 98 KURBAN NA BALKANU Urednici Biqana Sikimi} Petko Hristov Beograd 2007 http://www.balkaninstitut.com SERBIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES AND ARTS INSTITUTE FOR BALKAN STUDIES SPECIAL EDITIONS 98 KURBAN IN THE BALKANS Edited by Biljana Sikimi} Petko Hristov Belgrade 2007 http://www.balkaninstitut.com Published by Institute for Balkan Studies Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts Belgrade, 35 Knez Mihailova St. e-mail: [email protected] www.balkaninstitut.com Editorial Board Petko Hristov, Elena Marushiakova, Rachko Popov, Vesselin Popov, Biljana Sikimi}, Annemarie Sorescu-Marinkovi} Series Editor Dr. Du{an T. Batakovi} Reviewed by Prof. Dr. Nada Milo{evi}-Djordjevi}, corresponding member, SASA Dr. Mirjana Deteli} Publishing of this collection of papers was financed by the Ministry of Science and Environment Protection of the Republic of Serbia. This collection is the result of the project “Ethnic and social stratification of the Balkans” financed by the Ministry of Science and Environment Protection of the Republic of Serbia. http://www.balkaninstitut.com CONTENTS Note on spelling ......................................... 7 Editors’ introduction ..................................... 9 Andrey N. Sobolev: On Balkan names for the sacrificial animal onStGeorge’sDay................................ 15 Elena Marushiakova, Vesselin Popov: The vanished kurban. Mod- ern dimensions of the celebration of Kakava/H›drellez among theGypsiesinEasternThrace(Turkey).................. 33 Sanja Zlatanovi}: The Roma of Vranje: kurban with five faces .... 51 Svetlana ]irkovi}: Temporal dimensions of kurban for the deceased: refugeesfromKosovoandMetohija.................... 87 Katalin Kovalcsik: Gurbane as a representation of traditional iden- tity and culture in an Oltenian Rudar community .......... 109 Annemarie Sorescu-Marinkovi}: The gurban displaced: Bayash guest workersinParis.................................... 137 Biljana Sikimi}: Gurban in the village of Grebenac: between parti- cipants’memoryandresearchers’construction............ 153 Gerda Dalipaj: Kurban and its celebration in the Shpati Region in the first half of the 20th century. A case study of local social structure and identities............................... 181 Rigels Halili: Kurban today among the Albanians .............. 197 Petko Hristov, Tsvetana Manova: The new ‘old’ kurban. A case study . 209 Margarita Karamihova: Kurban sacrificial offering for good health ata‘strange’place.................................. 231 Petko Hristov: Celebrating the abandoned village: the ritual process inthepost-socialistBalkans........................... 245 Rachko Popov: Kurban sacrificial offerings on the feastdays of the summertime saints in the calendar tradition of the Bulgarians . 259 Vladimir Bocev: Kurban among the Macedonians ........... 269 Smiljana Djordjevi}: Du{no: blood sacrifice in the posthumous cus- toms of colonist Serbs in Omoljica ..................... 279 About the authors ........................................ 301 http://www.balkaninstitut.com http://www.balkaninstitut.com Note on spelling In the present volume, the names of places, persons and other special terms, as well as bibliographical references or quotations in the original language, are spelled as follows (unless stated or requested otherwise by the authors): a) for languages using the Latin alphabet: Albanian, Romanian and Turkish words are rendered in their original spelling; Romani words are also spelled with the use of the Latin alphabet; b) for languages using the Cyrillic alphabet: Bulgarian, Macedonian and Russian words are transliterated by individual systems of translitera- tion (however, the spelling might not be consistent, due to the lack of a unitary transliteration system); the Serbian words which were originally written in Cyrillic are rendered in Serbian Latin. The exceptions to these rules are the names widely known, which are written in their commonly known Anglicized form. The multiethnic and multilingual localities are referred to by their official state name. As well, specific terms might be spelled differently by different au- thors (e. g. teke–takke, Bayash–Boyash etc.). http://www.balkaninstitut.com http://www.balkaninstitut.com EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION Why the kurban in the Balkans today? The collection of studies Kurban in the Balkans gathers together a group of researchers from different branches of the humanities in an inter-disciplinary approach to post-modern anthropology, anthropological linguistics and the anthropology of folklore. The connecting thread of our joint work is personal experience of fieldwork in the modern-day Balkans, and the perception of tradition as a process rather than a state. The editors are, therefore, aware that this collection is a scholarly construct, an at- tempt to pin down insular practices of animal sacrifice, linked only by the fact that they take place in a common geographical location: the Balkans. This introduction emerges from an ongoing dialogue with existing anthropological and ethnolinguistic literature in an effort to expand inter- pretations of the contemporary kurban, or that which has been recon- structed on the basis of collective memory.1 In the Balkans today there is no single pattern for performing the kurban, and it is very difficult to de- termine if one ever existed. We look, then, for a minimal model of the 1Here we primarily have in mind the studies of Olivier Givre: Le kourban: pra- tiques sacrificielles et religiosite populaire en Bulgarie, Association franüaise d’etudes sur les Balkans, Etudes balkaniques: etat des savoirs et pistes de recherche, Paris, 19–20 decembre 2002, www.afebalk.org/recontres2002/textes/o.givre.pdf and Un rituel „balkanique“ ou un rituel dans les Balkans? Approche anthropologique du kourban en Bulgarie et en Grece du nord,These de doctorat de sociologie et anthropologie, Universite Luimere Lyon 2, http://demeter.univ-yon2.fr/sdx/theses/notice.xsp?id =lyon2.2006.givre_o-principal& id_doc=lyon2.2006.givre_o& isid =lyon2.2006.givre_o&base=documents&dn=1, as well as the study of Assia Popova: Le kourban, ou sacrifice sanglant dans les traditions balkaniques, Europaea : Journal of the Europeanists 1/1, 1995, 145–170 and the enciclopeadic entry kurban by Elena Uzeneva in the ethnolinguistic dictionary of Slav antiquity Slavjanske drevnosti, etnolingvisti~eskij slovar’, pod redakciej N. I. Tolstogo, Volume 3, Moscow 2004. http://www.balkaninstitut.com 10 KURBAN IN THE BALKANS contemporary Balkan kurban in the given chronotope. As a ritual, the kurbans exist only fragmentarily, if we take the model preserved in collec- tive memory, and insularly, i.e., it is only the research process that gives us the complete construct. The kurban encompasses an extremely wide concept of sacrifice which does not fit into the usual anthropological definitions. In this respect, we could speak of a ‘family religiosity’, or ‘local religiosity’. The kurban sacrifice is a symbolic and social practice in which people join individually, as a family, or locally. This personalisation is manifested by the intimate re- lation with ‘our saint’, ‘the saint of our family’, ‘our church’, ‘our village’. At community level, the practice of kurban oscillates between the private and the public. There is a direct line between home/house and tem- ple/cult place, but in the attempt to define ‘community’, there are no clear boundaries: families who make their own personal or private family prom- ises also participate in the joint, communal, local kurban. Kurban also im- plies commensuality, or the shared table. Assia Popova writes that kurban is “a prayer during a meal.” The food should be eaten together in the chronotope of the ritual, unlike an ordinary meal or food which must sub- mit to the rules of conservation and preservation. Specific local rituals are included in a kind of transconfessional community of the kurban. Understanding the kurban ritual requires knowledge of the social, historical and geographical context. The contemporary locale of the kurban is mainly the rural community and the urban periphery, where the practice acts as a marker of belonging and mutual identification and recog- nition. In the Balkans today, the kurban is usually a local social event and a holiday rather than a religious act. However, this is not always so, espe- cially in some of its other aspects which provide an entire range — from secret and entirely private to public, whether institutionalised or not. Nev- ertheless, the holiday dimension is common to all. Religious ritual prac- tice and local affiliation are absolutely connected, although with some change in the kurban’s social status coinciding with the emergence of neo-protestant religious communities. The kurban is an act of folk reli- gion, and at the same time a local religion. It is a constituent part of per- sonal and collective identity within a sacral topos. In addition, the kurban is often an opportunity for the urban to return to its rural, and for the rural to take its place in a new, transnational context. Balkan kurban? Even though the term kurban arrived in the Balkans via the Otto- mans, the practice in the Balkans is older than Islam. Among Balkan Cath- http://www.balkaninstitut.com EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION 11 olics there is no ritual killing of a sacrificial animal, which is practiced ex- clusively by the Orthodox and Muslims.