For a Corpus of Vlach Romanian Charms. Current Situation and Perspectives

Abstract

Starting from the role Sanda Golopenția played in establishing a digitized corpus of Romanian charms and in the advancement of scholarship on charms and charming, the author considers possible solutions for creating a corpus of Vlach Romanian charms. After an overview of Golopenția’s activity, the author introduces the Vlach Romanian community of Eastern Serbia, focusing on their specific traditional culture, which has developed, in the last two centuries, at the intersection of two cultures, Romanian and Serbian. In the light of the fact that ‘Vlach magic’ is today a real cultural brand of the community, the paper further details on the charm collecting activity taking place in the region in the last hundred years. The recorded texts form a rather heterogeneous collection, transcribed using different orthographies and even alphabets, by Serbian or Romanian researchers. In spite of the relatively large number of existing texts, a corpus of Vlach Romanian charms is still to be compiled. The author stresses that this task could be fulfilled following Golopenția’s ideas and principles, which, even if more than three decades old, prove extremely useful even today.