Traces of the Cult of Ancestors in the Slava Customs of the Serbs from Poljadija

Abstract

The materials collected during the fieldwork carried out by the research team of the Institute of Ethnography SASA during the June 2019 in the Poljadija region in Rоmania (the villages of Sokolovac, Lugovet and Zlatica) as a part of the activities planned within the project The Research of the Culture and the History of Serbs in Rоmania are discussed. A series of semi-structured interviews has been taken, whose structure was based both on general cumulative descriptions of slava customs among Serbs and on the experience and information gained during the fieldwork carried out in Jun 2017 in Serbian villages of Romanian side of the Danube Gorge. The focus is put on slava customs and, especially, on the elements of the cult of ancestors which can be perceived in the ritual actions that take place the day before and the day after the central celebration of slava: 1) the visit to the village graveyard the day before sveca, where a ritual invitation of ancestors to the slava feast is made; 2) dedication to the ancestors of all the food which is to be eaten during the second day of sveca. The most relevant fragments of the interviews are transcribed and analyzed from the ethnological and anthropological perspectives in order to offer new ethnographic data, reveal a clear link between these customs and those attested in the Serbian villages of Danube Gorge in 2017 and shed more light to the problem of the interpretation of some of their elements.