Presented are the perceptions of different foreigners who came to Slovene lands in the past or in the present time, as shown in Slovene folk narratives. Despite often stereotyped picture of the ...Others, the research demonstrates an immense complexity of these narratives and the fact that they tell more about Us than about Them. The book ('The Mysteriou Stranger and the Demonic Enemy. “The Other” and Otherness in Slovene Folk Narratives') brings a theoretical overview of the current research on otherness in folklore studies and contextualizes the examples into a wider international folkloristic, anthropological and historical frames. Stories about the Turks, the Napoleon’s French and the Huns reflect an interweaving of historical facts, archetypical imageries of the dangerous Foreigner and ideological influences. These narratives are strongly embedded into the landscape and reinforce the sense of a common identity of its members. The imagery of historic aggressors is understandably quite different from the imagery of Jews and the Roma, with whom the people of the Slovene lands have had a completely different kind of contact.The same goes for contemporary foreigners from other countries. Nevertheless, they all display a high level of stereotypization, generalization and projection of fears upon “the Other”.
Legends about the time of the Turkish raids form an important and substantial part of the Slovene oral traditions. A closer examination of their content reveals a mixture of mythologized historical ...events from the time of the Turkish raids that are preserved in the Slovene collective memory (thou influenced by different ideological agendas), elements that are in their core mythological and use the time of the Turkish raids more or less as a chronological frame, and elements that ex-press the archaic fear of “the Other”, which is the basic component of the image of “the Turk” in Slovene folklore. Materialization of these legends in the physical land-scape also expresses this multi-layered image of “the Turk” – from the “places of memory” that can be histori-cally confirmed to those that are just imagined and per-ceived as such – they all express a certain imagery that the community has about it’s own past and it’s under-standing and rationalization of the (physical) world that surrounds them. The predominantly negative and al-most demonized image of “the Turk” is an important part of the Slovene identity, collective memory and oral narratives
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