Проектът: нов живот за традицията или нов възглед за живота
The Project: New Life for the Tradition or a New Outlook on Life

Summary/Abstract: The essence of this text is to report the experience and the results from a unique project, applied for the first time in Bulgaria and entitled New Life for the old Tradition in the Valley of Mesta. The project is carried out by the culture houses in four villages – Garmen, Dabnitsa, Koprivlen and Pletena with organizing centre the municipality culture house “Iskra” in the village of Garmen, Gotse Delchev region, and is financially supported by King Baudouin Foundation and by Open Society Fund through the Foundation Workshop for Civil Initiatives, Sofia, program “Living Heritage”. The aim of the project was first to organize and teach a team from the native people who should investigate and record memories and narratives for the local beliefs and traditions from the past. Then the materials had to be processed and written on paper in order to be preserved in special archives in the libraries at the culture houses of the four villages. A selection from the materials was made in order to be published in a collection and in audio cassettes and compact discs. Another step was the organization of clubs for reviving some specific traditions, different in the different villages – a workshop for making traditional drums in Dabnitsa, an amateur theatrical group in Garmen, a folklore ensemble in Pletena and a workshop for traditional costumes in Koprivlen. The final stage of the project supposed organizing concerts with the renewed repertoire of the amateur groups in the different villages and a concert-promotion in the village of Garmen. The experience from the project both of leaders and participants confirmed that knowledge about the past preserves the identity of the community and encourages its self esteem, but not only: it also offers some solutions for the present. The engagement in cultural activities in a specific way gets people involved and interested in the life of their community, gives color and meaning to their own life, motivates them for seeking solutions in difficult situations.

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