History and Legend in Stone: to Kiss the Baba
History and Legend in Stone: to Kiss the Baba

Summary/Abstract: The intention of this contribution is to find out what the amorphous stones called babas personify, why they are donated fruit and wheat, why a constant feature, found together with all "our" babas, is the element of humidity, the presence of water, and what the meaning of the legend about kissing the baba is. This is achieved first by the field work on the island o fKrk and then by a unique Grobnik baba, a most precious clue to the questions put, a confirmation of the babas being part of the female-cult. The author presents arguments to support her thesis that the statue of Eve on the old town hall in Ljubljana is a christianized form of "our" baba. The article is brought to the conclusion-reached gradually by the field work on the island of Krk and then in Grobnik and by the research in the upper part of Croatian Mediterranean (Istra, Velebit) - that the features of archaic culture, supressed and sublimated, live on through symbolical undertones of the mythological and legendary heritage in a kind of synergistic reality of cults and legends, in Braudelian constant meeting of the past and present, in the unbroken pouring out of one into the other.

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