A Contribution to the Study of Oriental Cults in the Balkan Folklore

Abstract

We are often inclined to interpret the term and notion of Orient, oriental, as referring to such material and spiritual goods which ahd directly or indirectly come to the Balkans with the Ottomans, and which from the chronological point of view certainly belong to a more recent cultural stratum. Our observation in this paper however, concerned with much older epochs, with the periods of prehistory and antiquity, during which various cultural influences from the Orient came to the Balkans and which we can discern as pale fragments in the folklore of modern Balkan peoples.