To the folklore tradition of the Old Believers in Bulgaria

Abstract

The article deals with calendar songs and games of the Christian carnival Maslenica holiday of the Russian population lived in Bulgaria for a long time. The Nekrasov-Cossacks retained their folk culture in a foreign cultural environment. The Pre-Christian features of the people’s traditions brought from a distant homeland were perceived by them as a part of their special worldview, that is why they were consistently transmitted from generation to generation as a innermost knowledge. In spite of the separate facts of the cultural interference (Bulgarian-Russian), the archaic rituals and folklore songs of the Maslenica carnival cycle have been preserved (although only in the memory of the informants).