Хаджи Димитър и Стефан Караджа в българския песенен фолклор
Khadji Dimitar and Stelan Karadja in Bulgarian Folk Songs

Summary/Abstract: The folk song cycles dedicated to the famous Bulgarian revolutionaries Khadji Dimitar and Stefan Karadja are the subject of this study. These cycles are the continuation of the rich epic tradition in the Bulgarian folk culture. What is new in the songs about the two heroes is the spirit and ideas of the struggle against the foreign Ottoman oppression, the revolutionary pathos of the period of the Bulgarian national revival they are impregnated with and the optimism of the approaching victory. This imparts the song composition with the features of a complex contradictory unity between tradition and innovation, old and new ideological content which places them at the margin of folklore. The attempts of the folk singer to break away with tradition are rarely successful. They are reduced to the direct plagiarism from the high poetry (the poems of Christo Botev) or lead to the „vulgarization” of the lofty epic content. Despite this the songs about Khadji Dimitar and Stefan Karadja give the evidence of the historical consciousness of the Bulgarian, of his new attitude towards the historic fate of the ethnos. In this respect they bear the seal of the positive, patriotic influence of folklore.

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