A Balkan Custom: Half as Old as Time : A Study in Ancient Myth and Living Ritual

Nigel Allenby Jaffé has taken thirteen years to research this book. Besides his frequent visits to Greece and Bulgaria, where he has witnessed many customs in their villages and small towns, he has visited Turkey for further background information. He has turned to prehistory and history, mythology, ethnology, anthropology, archaeology, and ethnography for supporting evidence, and, to be able to shine some new light on an otherwise murky topic, has dipped his toes into the equally opaque waters (to him) of genetics, linguistics, demography and palaeo-botany!

Through his research into living rituals, the author questions some traditional explanations of ancient myths, and puts forward some of his own theories. He begins by examining in some detail a passage in Book VI of Homer's Iliad. The author believes that the rituals he has observed in many Balkan villages stand in a similar relationship to certain Greek myths, as children's nursery rhymes do on the politics of the day when they were written. Without studying their origins they make little sense; the same can be said of the myths which can still be seen being enacted in midwinter or pre-Lent in many a Balkan village. The author has quite a bit to say about what he calls "the ménage à trois" between Dionysos, Theseus and Ariadne; he believes that Zeus did not hurl his thunderbolts in anger; that blinding was not necessarily a punishment; and that rape was not what it seemed. He sees this ancient ritual as something unchanging much in a much changing world.

The text is illustrated by over 250 photographs.