The broader source material for this article is the Soviet-era correspondence of the Folklore Department (FD) of the Fr. R. Kreutzwald State Literary Museum, today the Estonian Folklore Archive of the Estonian Literary Museum. This collection consists of letters and pos...

The article gives an insight into the hagiology (Old Russian житие) of Alexander Nevsky (ca. 1220–1263), Grand Prince of Novgorod and Vladimir. It was probably put down in the 1280s, at the Nativity Monastery in Vladimir, where his body was initially buried and where, i...

The article compares the biography of St. Stephen of Perm, written by Epiphanius the Wise, with the stories about the miracle maker Stephen known in Komi folklore. The author explores the influences of Russian culture on Permian (Komi) culture by mediation of St. Stephe...

The 1990s was a tumultuous decade in the Estonian society - the crisis in Estonian folkloristic studies was reflected in the following phenomena: theory lagged behind practice, the research priorities hitherto (Kalevala-song, folklore's poetics) were substituted for new...

Folklorists have long been aware that place names hold the memory of historically significant people and events. The landscape laden with inherited meanings is marked by names and objects and recreated constantly by narration functions as the map of historical memory in...

The article explores the use of folk healing methods in the mixed Estonian and Finnish lore group (called virulased), who have settled in the village of Ryzhkovo. The village was established around 1803 as an ethnically mixed Lutheran settlement in West Siberia. The mat...

The article explores the problems which emerged in professional art education during the 20th century in order to explain the reasons for the unpopularity of artistic creation dealing with local visual identity in Estonia in the last decade of the century. The article a...

In order to become relevant in a given culture, the imported phenomena (e.g. medicinal plants) have to be integrated into own, while also remaining ‘foreign’ in some respect (which, in the case of medicinal plants, gives additional potency to their healing power). The p...

How could "pharmaceuticals" like elecampane root, asaphoetida resin, nitric, etc. be used as remedies in folk medicine? One route was the local manor lords and their wives, who disseminated the knowledge they had acquired both from the literature published in Germany as...