Love and Wedding Traditions in the Balkans: From Orient to Occident Cover Image

Love and Wedding Traditions in the Balkans: From Orient to Occident
Love and Wedding Traditions in the Balkans: From Orient to Occident

Author(s): Dragos Marian Radulescu
Subject(s): Customs / Folklore, Romanian Literature
Published by: Editura Pro Universitaria
Keywords: love; marriage; tradition; loyalty; death;

Summary/Abstract: "Honest face, you would like to hear a wonderful story about love, devotion and death?" ... for the narrator is a rhetorical question, he knows very well that nothing is more exciting and alive to the listener than the combination of love and death, fatal love, unhappy love or unshared or prohibited love. This subject raises fascination in the Occident where it is dedicated the most beautiful songs and the legends of ancient troubadours known. Tristan and Isolde or Romeo and Juliet are only some examples of classical masterpieces of European literature illustrating the myth of chivalric love that ends tragically for those involved. Happy love fall in history, writing novels is only for fatal love, love that is threatened and condemned by others, society and life. More talk about the passion of love, the suffering caused by love than the love fulfilled and completed by marriage. But in Orient is more present physically love, because the freedom to choose who to love is more restricted over the patriarchal family, considered a model of authority. And stories of love usually end with a marriage full of symbolic rituals, whether it's a love shared or not. This study aims to explore how love and marriage are seen in the Occident and Orient, and some wedding traditions of Romania and the Balkans.

  • Issue Year: 2012
  • Issue No: SUPPL.
  • Page Range: 213-221
  • Page Count: 9
  • Language: English