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  • The wedding customs and son...
    Mihajlović Verica R.

    Baština, 01/2017, Volume: 2017, Issue: 42
    Journal Article

    One of the most important events in an individual's life is wedding, that is an act which symbolizes founding of a family. This important custom of a life cycle is marked by some customs, or their fragments thus helping preservation of national tradition, national beliefs and legends. This paper deals with a very narrow site, village Graničane in the surroundings of Leposavić in the north of Kosovo and Metohija, an example that will serve for description of wedding customs and (some) wedding songs. These elements present fitful attempt to keep these latent witnesses of former life in the village, former way of marking the most important events in one's life, former soul of the peasants from this area. The wedding as a ritual in the village of Graničane is characterized by a number of different elements in terms of their nature, each consisting ritual always has its why, its reason of performing, regardless of the fact whether it is an entertainment or it has a higher aim - protection from evil powers, prosperity of the newly weds, providing of healthy and wealthy heirs... All events related to the wedding in Graničane show strong patriarchate which is permeated with all the threads of this life cycle custom. Starting from the choice of the spouse, in all other described customs, masculanization is omnipresent while marginalization of women is emphasized in every sense. Reports of people from the terrain point to some changes and some, due to society modernization, vanishing customs which exist only in the memories of older inhabitants of the village, that is why writing down these segments of memories of the older village inhabitants is of crucial importance in order to preserve cultural tradition of the people from this village in Kosovo and Metohija. Some particularities observed in the village of Graničane point to the importance of distinguishing narrow ethnological sites and their studying, for any generalization (such as national tradition of Kosovo and Metohija as a whole) leads to the overlooking and thus to the latent support of disappearance of numerous characteristic elements of national tradition of every village.