St Paraskeve in the Balkan Context

The cult of the great saints is usually much wider and involves more than their hagiographies alone. These, as a special literary genre, have to consider strict compositional principles and an even stricter church canon. Not even the apocryphal hagiographies, although they most often originate in oral tradition, can completely escape the influence of these norms, which come into play as soon as an oral legend starts gaining the form of a literary composition. The cult is rather freer and much less dependent on the Church. Once they become a part of popular religion, the officially recognised saints almost invariably enter a ready-made semantic field that acts as their natural surroundings. Here, by the working of many generations, they build up the multilayered, developed, often unexpected, but always logical connections with the tradition and the culture to which they belong. These fertile and inescapable interactions are reflected in elements of folklore, especially folk literature, from the major prose forms like folktales and epic poetry, to the so-called minor genres (nursery rhymes, incantations, proverbs, and so on). In association with other elements of material and spiritual traditional culture (such as rites, customs and beliefs), stories about the saints tended to spread everywhere, rendering their roots and influences difficult to elucidate.