Kurov N. Narratives of the Circassian Folklore in Three Villages of Uspensky District in Krasnodar Krai
Nurbiy Kurov
Miklukho-Maklai Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the RAS
Moscow, Russian Federation
ORCID: 0000-0002-1341-0899
E-mail: bnurbi@gmail.com
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ABSTRACT. Folklore in the Circassian villages of Uspensky district of Krasnodar Krai, passed on orally, includes legends about the emergence of the villages, stories about ancestral heroes and various fairy tale plots. However, more than a decade later, storytellers have lost many details and heroes of the plots. Now from the former rich folklore legends only short versions of the basic legends, which existed in villages since the end of the 19th century and have reached the present time in the reduced form, have remained. It should be noted that in the folklore of Circassians of Urupsky, Kurgokovsky and Konokovsky villages cultural heroes along with ruling princes are heroic ancestors. Legends about them sometimes have the character of mythical epic. Narratives about heroic deeds of ancestors do not so much reflect real events of those years as form the idea that the folk memory gives the respondents an opportunity to attribute their clan, their ancestors to one of the key characters of folk history. In the archives of the Adyghe Republican Institute of Humanities Research named after T. M. Kerashev the author found the material recorded in the named villages at the time of ethnographic expeditions in the first half of the 20th century. A number of folklore plots were recorded during the author's field research in 2021–2023. Thanks to the use of structured, semi-structured and in-depth interviews during data collection, the author was able to record and then analyse the folklore of the inhabitants of Circassian villages in Uspensky district of Krasnodar Krai.
KEYWORDS: Circassian folklore, oral history, Circassians, Krasnodar Krai, Caucasus
FOR CITATION: Kurov N. Narratives of the Circassian folklore in three villages of Uspensky District in Krasnodar Krai. Kunstkamera. 2025. 1 (27): 100–108. (In Russian). DOI: 10.31250/2618-8619-2025-1(27)-100-108
DOI 10.31250/2618-8619-2025-1(27)-100-108
UDC 398(=352.3)
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