Dragons in Slavic and Romanian Cultures

Abstract

Due to its geographical position, the Romanian ethnic territory is at the confluence of various languages, cultures and civilizations and the Romanian culture shares many features with the Slavic cultures because of the linguistic and cultural contact and the similar historical conditions under which they flourished. The issue of Slavic influence on Romanian culture has appealed to many researchers that have sought to explain the mystery of how a Romance culture survived in a territory surrounded by Slavs. Similar customs and folk representations circulated in both directions – from common Romanian to the Slavic languages and cultures and vice versa. Some motifs concerning the demons should demonstrate a broad area of common or similar representations in both types of cultures. This work will thus offer a new approach to the study of the Romanian-Slavic and Romanian-Balkan relationship and we hope a synthetic and unified vision of their common elements, and it will try to give some new ideas about an unresolved, debated, and contentious topic.

Keywords

• dragons
• Slavic
• Romanian
• similarities
• mythology
• common cultural inheritance.