Народный календарь и квазиагиография

Abstract

The border between the saints’ names and the homonymous feasts is not visible often; the feast names are used in quite similar syntactical constructions to those with saints’ names: in conjunction with verbs of motion and other predicative constructions. Calendar paroemias are the most frequent texts where the saints’ names are used and all actions mentioned in these paroemias are applied to saints. So, we can see the role of saints in the weather definition, agricultural work, time regulation.The tendency of combining few neighbour, paronymous or in any other corresponding dates into one system exists in folk Calendar tradition. Due to this tendency the blood or social relationships between saints, whose feasts are neighbour, are established: St. Malanya (December 31) is St. Basyl’s (January 01) mother; the eve of St. Nicholas Feast is called St. Nicholas’s Father etc. The approach may be based on the names consonance: “Власий Медосья хватил за волосья” (“St. Blaise has seized St. Medosios’s (deformed St. Modestus name) hair). Not only paroemias but even longer legendary texts, calendar ritual songs describe events of these “calendar” saints lives, that absolutely do not correspond to official literary lives of these saints. Thus quasihagiographic texts arise, that substitute the proper hagiography.