engleski

Against the Corrosion of Romantic Memory: A Regenerative Ethnographic Stroll through Croatian Landscapes and Cultures of the Iron Age

Through the analysis of testimonies within our ethnographic field research and its comparison with examples of Croatian oral literature, as well as with the culture-historical data about specific toponyms, a historical continuity of female cults to the Christian Virgin Mary on Croatian soil are being perceived. These are observed from the pre-antique cult of Neolithic Terra Mater, pre-Christian Slavic Mokoš and Mor(an)a, often represented by animals. Their holy heights in symbolic landscape have been devalued and with time forgotten or they have been removed from them. Beyond the toponimic devil’s larynx, fairies’ passages and iron doors a surrounding connected with more recent antique warrior gods and/or their Slavic counterparts and their Christian substitutes is established. Possibly we are dealing with a kind of territorial dividing line – a door of passage between the neolithic indigenous population and the antique immigrants of the metal age. At the same time it is the passage between the female otherworldly into the male of this world of Slavic mythological landscape consecration which continues after the antique tradition. The higher and lower sacral points of an imaginary quadrangle most often relate to each other as the world of the god-father and goddess-daughter opposed to the world of the goddess-mother and god-son. They are separated by water while the newly won higher elevations belong to the gods. Toponyms which contain the adjective iron are connected to adjacent sites of resources (gold, silver, iron ore, coal, oil) for warfare of that time which is ascribed to gods or rather to cult locations at which during the antique era new hostile weapons might have been forged. As the pre-Christian Slavic devotion on Croatian soil was scientifically mostly unfoundedly researched or merely sporadically depicted due to a lack of archeological material evidence, the systematic and interdisciplinary culture-historical scientific research should be the basis for interesting new findings.

Croatia; mythology; Neolithic female divine principle; iron-age male divine principle; metal weaponry

Rad je prijavljen i pod projektnim brojem 09/59 Zaklade za znanost HAZU.