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Paper short abstract

By mapping folklore narratives of the “supernatural” and death-related rituals onto the landscape, interdisciplinary research demonstrates that village and estate boundaries embody liminal symbolism, marking thresholds between the “world of the living” and beyond.

Paper long abstract

By mapping folklore narratives and ritual activities onto the landscape, the research demonstrates that boundaries such as village and estate boundaries function as liminal spaces. Oral traditions concerning apparitions, sacrifices, burials, deaths, and killings of folkloric beings are particularly concentrated along cadastral and estate boundaries, endowing them with a “supernatural” dimension. Interdisciplinary analysis combining folkloristics, anthropology, archaeology, and geodesy further reveals that many old landscape boundaries were marked by Slavic mythical sites or Christian sacred places. In the Karst region of Slovenia, several village boundaries were also associated with ritual activities known as “dead resting sites.” These practices linked to marking the place of resting with the dead are interpreted as man’s last passage – from the world of the living to the world of the dead. Their occurrence specifically on boundaries can be understood through van Gennep’s theory of rites of passage, which emphasizes the transitional and transformative character of liminal spaces. Historical records also indicate that landscape boundaries were connected with a variety of ritual activities and narratives: worship of boundary deities, sacredness of the border pomerium in antiquity, sanctions for boundary violations, the establishment of sacred points, the deposition of objects during the demarcation of borders, ritual processions along them etc. Thus, boundaries were not merely physical divisions of “ours” and “theirs”, but complex cultural constructs. Crossing them meant entering an alternative reality, where the landscape itself articulated the threshold between the “world of the living” and the beyond.