The Interethnic and Interreligious Values in Turkish and Crimean Legends
Zherdieva, Anastasiia (2014)
Zherdieva, Anastasiia
The Donner Institute, Åbo Akademi
2014
Kuvaus
Anastasiia Zherdieva PhD, is a research fellow at Middle- East Technical University- in Ankara, Turkey, in the Department of Social Anthropology. She is mostly interested in mythology and the study of folklore, especially in Crimean and Turkish folk legends, but also the relation-ships between legend and myth, sacred geography in legends and the miraculous in myth consciousness. Among her publications is a social anthropological analysis of Crimean legends Crimean Legends as Phenomenon of World Culture (Saarbrücken 2013).
Tiivistelmä
The present paper examines interethnic and interreligious values in Turkish and Crimean folk legends. The folklore of both Crimea and Turkey has a multicultural background, which makes both corpuses of texts suitable for research. In the course of the study, a wide range of published Turkish and Crimean legends were reviewed and analysed. There are two deeply-rooted tendencies in the studied legends. First of all, the interethnic and interreligious relationships can be described as ghastly and cursed. Thus, antagonists in the legends are often from ethnic minorities or strangers in relation to domestic ethnic groups. However, if the texts are analysed thoroughly, we can see that there are important sacred cultural values at the core of the legends, including values of life, health, and divinity.