Satul românesc din Bărăganul Brăilei, între tradiție și modernism
Abstract
The Romanian village preserved, throughout the ages, the practices, traditions, magical rituals and superstitions inherited from the Dacian-Roman ancestors. Gathered in part and often linked to the great Christian celebrations and liturgical practices of the church, they became, together with the authentic Christian traditions, a constituent part of Romanians’ identity. Under the pressure of modernism, the development of large cities at the expense of the rural environment, the process started after World War II and aggravated by the destruction of many villages in the last period of the communist regime, some of these traditions began to fade. The opening of Romania to the West after the fall of the communist regime, from 1989, brought with it a rapid change in the attitudes of Romanians to the traditions and habits preserved and transmitted from ancient times in the Romanian villages, which began to appear compared to some of the events encountered in the sunset, which they borrowed without any discernment, accelerating the process further. Aware that the loss of these traditional values of the Romanian village can become irreparable with the passage of time, the Orthodox Romanian Church, in turn retaining an important cultural and spiritual
treasure created by the Romanian people in Around Christian values, he ordained that the year 2019 be the “Tribute year of the Romanian village”, a suitable opportunity to bring to the collective memory these lost traditions and customs, or about to be abandoned at the expense of some “imported” from the west, in Vogue Now especially in the great urban agglomerations, where they tend to migrate to rural communities as it is. The present study puts in light, punctually, some traditions that I have known and practiced in the village of Brăila’s Steppe where I lived my childhood, such as those related to the great religious celebrations over the year, by the important events in human life – birth, marriage and death – or those related to domestic life, social-community, etc., A general approach requiring a space that would exceed the frameworks of a study, due to the diversity and particularities. These traditions and customs, differ not only from an ethnographic area of the country to another, but also from one community to another.
