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DOI: 10.46698/VNC.2026.32.25.008 ELEMENTS OF FAMILY RITUALITY IN THE KARACHAY-BALKARIAN NARTS’ EPOS
Gulieva, Farizat H.
Kavkaz Forum. 2026. Issue 25.
Abstract:
The article explores the specific ways, in which the family-everyday rituals of the Karachays and Balkarians are reflected in the national version of the Narts’ epos. For this purpose, a continuous sampling method was used to extract texts from the corpus of the Narts’ sagas, that contain elements of rituals and ceremonies, related to family-everyday life. The study also employed an interdisciplinary approach and a linguacultural analysis. It is noted, that the Nartiada represents a unique phenomenon of oral literature among several ethnic groups of the North Caucasus, and it is quite natural, that each national version, in one form or another, has absorbed a significant amount of information about the spiritual and material culture, mentality and everyday life of the people, who created it. Given, that many of them are peoples with young writing and their history has been preserved only in fragmentary form, folklore texts, including Narts’ sagas, can serve as a supplementary source of information about the past of their bearers, albeit sometimes presented in a coded or transformed form. This article examines rituals, associated with the birth of a child, wedding and funeral and memorial rites. It is noted, that, due to the heroic focus of the narratives, descriptions of the everyday life of the narts are given little space. Nevertheless, when they consisted with the ideological and compositional goals of the works, such elements were incorporated into their narrative fabric. Of particular interest in this regard are the tales of Alaugan’s marriage and the birth of the nart heroes Sosuruk and Karashauai. Since the central characters of the Karachay-Balkarian version of the Nartiad are immortal, according to the main version, there is virtually no information about funeral and memorial rites in the tales. However, there are a number of texts, that describe posthumous rituals and memorial customs in considerable detail. The study revealed, that elements of the ancient spiritual culture of the Karachay-Balkarian people were reworked in the Narts’ epos in consistance with ideological and goal-oriented requirements of heroic poetics.
Keywords: Karachay-Balkarian folklore, Narts’ epos, family rituals, human life cycles, birth, marriage, death.
Language: Russian
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 For citation: Gulieva, F.H. Elements of family rituality in the Karachay-Balkarian Narts’ epos. KAVKAZ-FORUM. 2026, iss. 25 (32), pp. 5-19. (In Russian). DOI 10.46698/VNC.2026.32.25.008 ← Contents of issue |
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