Ute DUKOVA (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences/University of Frankfurt am Main) On sacred time in Balkan languages: The lexicon of the popular

calendar feasts Since the concept of time in language is a socio-cultural one, one might assume that there is to be revealed a Balkan concept of time. From the various aspects of the problem we will focus in this paper on the representation of time in the popular lexicon of seasonal feasts in the Balkans by using an ethnolinguistic approach. The folk calendar is based on the liturgical calendar of the Orthodox Church, which during the Byzantine epoch organised various pagan feasts into a new system giving to them an interpretatio christiana. Therefore the ecclesiastical terminology is mainly Greek and transferred to the other Balkan languages by direct borrowings or loan translations, the latter occurring widely in Slavonic. But this system is an open one and undergoes permanent development bringing the archaic pagan meaning of the feasts to the surface by a popular name besides the ecclesiastical one (e.g. Bulg. koleda for Rozhdestvo Khristovo) or by adding an epithet, e.g. Black Tuesday, Mad Wednesday, dirty days, Fiery Mary, Pantelej the traveller. Along with the official calendar system in the Balkan folk calendar there are to be found some latent systems: 1. the naming of months after saints, undoubtedly due to ancient Greek tradition to name months after gods-protectors. This stratum shows great activity in word formation giving rise to names of plants after their time of blooming or ripening, 2. feasts dedicated to domestic or wild animals, especially a series of wolf feasts throughout the year, one of which is named Our Lady of the wolves revealing the conception of the Potnia theron, the mistress of the animals. The main mechanism of adapting an ecclesiastical term to the archaic magical thought is folk etymology e.g. the name of St. Andrew is connected in Greek with andreios strong, in Bulgarian with edar id. accompanied by imitative magic of boiling crops on this day in order to stimulate the growth of crops. The folk calendar is based on rural works, but the agrarian character takes a religious dimension the experience of cyclical time, of the eternal return. This is to be seen in the tendency to form cycles of time a winter and a summer feast of the same saint as St. Johns day on January 7th and June 24th and in the numerous plural forms of feasts. Both the ethnographic level ceremonies, food, fast, taboos and the linguistic level show that time in the Balkan folk culture is not a neutral temporal category, but has inherent qualities there are good and bad days, dangerous and prosperous periods with varying degrees of concentration. The materialisation of time leads to numerous metonymies and further to a personification of time (e.g. Baba Marta, Our Lady Polysporitissa), often with a demonic character. One of the most popular demons of the Balkan folk belief, the Kallikantzaros can be analysed as a seasonal demon. The essential feature of the Balkan concept of time is the striking multitude of time marked as sacred. One might say that time in general is sacred, full of substance and meaning.