Paper short abstract:

The paper examines how religious content ascribed originally to pre-Christian paganism, but incorporated into a Catholic fair, was separated from it and used to create a reenactment of a pagan rite that took over also the place and the name of the Catholic feast.

Paper long abstract:

Rękawka was originally a Catholic fair - one of the favourite subjects of investigation for 19th century ethnographers, since it contained elements classified by them as pre-Christian. Forbidden by the Austrian administration during the partition of Poland, Rękawka reappeared contemporarily in a surprising form, i.e. as a historical reenactment of a pagan feast, prepared according to ethnographical data and relative to the original fair. My purpose is to examine how sacral contents circulate firstly in time and secondly through various cultural strata; how, in this particular case, they were transformed from ritual elements into ethnographical knowledge, and finally, interpreted by the "second" Rękawka organizers, again became at least quasi-ritual, as they are the basis for the rite reenactment which, secular in its assumptions, is commonly perceived as a neo-pagan, and consequently, religious.