THE ROLE OF FOLK CALENDARS IN LIFE ORGANIZING IN OLD TRADITIONAL COMMUNITIES

Abstract

In the traditional community of Banat, a component part of Romania, oral folk calendars played a fundamental role in the cyclical organization of people's lives because they contained non-riten pagan oral feasts and feast with fixed dates dedicated to the saints. In many localities, the celebration of the pagan divinities overlapped over the celebration of the Christians saints, in an extremely original vision, secular vision, and in the course of time developed a severe popular calendar system that was organically integrated into the folk culture. With regard to such a process of cultural origin, the Banat comes with an special ethnological dowry of archaic nature and quantitative of informational nature but consumed on social plan. This traditional heritage is a significant testimony to highlight an ancient mark of an powerful ethnic and cultural identity of the Romanians in this province, a phenomenon that provides a strong basis for the research of the multiethnic common Banat fund of the popular archaic culture specific to spoken languages and folk calendars.