Decıpherıng Shared Herıtage: Folklore Tradıtıons, Natıonal Identıtıes And Cultures Of Dıstınguıshıng In The Balkans

In 2003 a film by the Bulgarian director Adela Peeva, named "Whose is This Song" attracted the attention of many film-reviewers in Europe. The story narrated in the film is simple - the main character, the film-maker herself trav-els around all countries in the Balkan peninsula and, as if by occasion, over-hears a song that, no matter being sung in different languages and versions, has an easily recognizable melody pattern in all the diverse locations. At the direc-tor's inquiries about where and how the people have learned this song the answers fall into an expected direction - it has been known "for ages" by the local communities (and, presumably, the national communities as a whole), and is thus "theirs" - Greek, Turkish, Bulgarian, Serbian, Macedonian, Bosnian, etc. The fact that the song is sung among other communities and regions in the peninsula is what the representatives of these different local groups are shown as unaware of, and this is directly approached in the film and reconstructed in a series of parallel situations in investigation of the song's "true" origin. Hardly any of the film's viewers will be misled to expect, that a reliable and historically justified reconstruction of such an origin would be at all possible. However, what the group of the informants in the film lacks as knowledge, that viewers seem to be informed: the song, in spite of its local and regional characteristics, is a legacy shared by many other communities in the Balkan region and its claiming a separate identity of national origins and specificities is a futile task.