Names of saints and holidays in various Romanian ethnographic areas and cultural spaces

Abstract

The paper aims to highlight two aspects: on the one hand, to what extent names of saints interact with names of holidays in the Christian (Orthodox, Greek-Catholic, Roman-Catholic) calendar and in the folk calendar; on the other hand, whether names of saints and/or holidays in Romanian cultural space can be found in other cultural spaces. Upon looking at names of saints and holidays over the year in the calendars mentioned above, sometimes we notice similarities or contaminations, whereas on other occasions we come across differences. We focus our attention on twelve saints, correlated with twelve holidays over the year, celebrated by Christians regardless of religious confession and cultural space. The regional names of the holidays from various Romanian ethnographic areas attest to their age. The complexity of this research is underpinned by our synchronic analysis and interdisciplinary perspective (linguistics, ethnology, religion, mythology), which also refers to identity-otherness relationships, eponyms, isotopies, synonymy and antinomy connections, contamination and multiculturalism in onomastics.