Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/70

 38 Serbian Habits and C^istoms.

as benediction has been given by the priest. Sometimes she has adopted them by transforming them into Christian customs — for example, the Slava, which was the worship of ancestors, and which became the worship of saints ; adoptioji, which was an artificial pagan parentage, and which became a Christian custom blessed by the Church.

The Serbian Government took the initiative in the creation of tribunals for common interest, and by their creation abolished the use of the customary rights.

Customs which were not against public interests and religious views, or which were not apparently antagonistic, lived and have remained untouched or almost the same. These are the economical and medical customs.

This adaptation of the habits to the interest of the Government and to the views of the Church lasted as long as the Serbian States of the Middle Age remained, that is to say, until the end of the fifteenth century. When the Turks conquered the Serbian States, the dynasties and the nobility, representatives of the organisation of the Govern- ment, disappeared. In the country, there only remained the mass of the people. What mattered to the Turks was the peacefulness of the people, the payment of taxes, the execution of the statute-labours and the presence of a Serbian representative responsible to the Turkish Government.

Left to themselves, the Serbian people almost secured a revival of the primitive customs which had governed them before the formation of the Serbian State. This return towards the past was not very difficult, especially in the mountainous regions of the West where the influence of the Church and of the State had hardly made itself felt. In these mountainous regions the tribe's life reappears, the chiefs are not only chiefs of the tribe but also its repre- sentatives towards the Turks, and the mediators between the {people and the pachas. In the East, in the countries less mountainous where the organisation of the State in the