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• Alligators in the Sewers: Urban Legends about Terrifying Animals and Frightening Places

  7-29

  Éva Mikos

  Views:

  101

  The aim of the present study is to provide an overall picture of the nature of urban folklore using the “Alligators in the Sewers” urban legend type circulated in both the Hungarian and international press and by word of mouth. While contemporary legends have attracted only sporadic attention in Hungarian research to date, by illustrating the historical development of this legend type the aim of the present case study is to demonstrate how the phenomenon has existed in the Hungarian press for almost 200 years.

  The present study attempts to identify the kind of opportunities for interpretation offered by these stories in the field of folkloristics; the extent to which they are relevant beyond their literal meaning; and the ways in which they shed light on modern-day understandings of the world. Giant reptiles that are not indigenous to Europe are terrifying to the average individual, while at the same time they evoke a yearning for the natural world in city dwellers trapped amid concrete walls. Urban sewers and storm drains hold similar terrors: on the one hand, they are there to remove filth and symbolize the more unsavory aspects of urban life, while on the other hand their hidden presence beneath the ground offers ample opportunity for the projection of numerous fantasies. Animals that lurk in the sewers, from where they emerge to attack people, are manifestations, contained within simple, traditional narrative frameworks, of the murkiness of highly structured societies and of the sense of danger that this opacity engenders in us. The emergence and persistence of such stories can be attributed to a number of social practices, such as circuses, sideshows, and the keeping of reptiles as pets, along with the respective press reports and rumors.

• An Informal Group of Hungarians in the Multicultural, Urban Culture of Berlin

  67-86

  Eszter Valnerné Török

  Views:

  46

  Minority groups leave their traces in the cultural life of cities and it is an important task of science to track down and document these traces. The formation of ethnic communities through self-initiative has been intensively researched and ethnic groups play an increasingly important role in the representation of cities. This study gives a brief insight into the present research work that shows and documents an example of ethnic community organization in the urban space of a large city. The focus of this research is an informal group of Hungarians in Berlin, the Berlin Szalon, which already looks back on 50 years of history. After a brief excursion into the history of salon culture in Berlin, the historical roots of the Berlin Szalon are described. In the second part of this study, some results of an online questionnaire survey carried out amoung the audience of the Berlin Szalon are presented. An important objective of the data collection was to determine the motivation factors and attitude of the salon guests when attending the salon evenings and find out the audience’s opinion of the salon events.

• New Settlements in Bishkek: Law, Urban Space, Culture and Socio-Economic Development

  99-122

  Mirlan Alymbaev

  Views:

  83

  In Kyrgyzstan, internal migrants in search of a better life left high mountains, clean air, and their native village. There are tens of thousands of such people around the capital city of Bishkek. Physically, they are in the capital in the status of city dwellers, but living conditions, the level of access to public services are at the level of remote regions. And this is how these internal migrants live for tens of years, a new generation of children is growing up who were born in these slums where lack of infrastructure such as schools, drinking water, medical facility, electricity, and transport.

  This study is aimed to explore the living conditions of residents in the new settlements and their rights for decent housing. The study was prepared in order to attract the attention of the state authorities to solve the urgent problems of the residents.

• Remain of a Dialect in an Urban Cultural Medium by Means of Folk-tales: Role of Some Tale-tellers of a Hungarian Ethnic Group Székelys of Bukovina in Hungary

  31-46

  Helen Pal

  Views:

  43

  The aim of the paper is to show the role that storytellers can play in the transmission of traditions, identity and dialect today. The paper focuses on a Hungarian ethnic group: Szeklers of Bukovina settled in Hungary in 1945. The main aim of this paper is to present the function of dialects in tales and tale-telling after the change of traditional peasant way of life and dialects. In Bukovina this ethnic group was isolated from the Hungarian mother-country and the majority of Hungarians, their cultural and language changes did not reach them, therefore the members of this ethnic group could retain their traditional culture and dialect. However, in Hungary they were settled into 38 settlements, thereby their original communities broke up. The dialectal and sociolinguistic data of this paper comes from the storyteller’s websites, written and oral personal stories, the text and sound-recording of folk-tales, and also data of formal dialectal researches of this ethnic group is used. This paper presents an analysis of some storytellers who use several dialect elements of this ethnic group, besides the role of dialects in tale-telling is studied too. It is an important aspect of this analyse how some storytellers utilize their dialect in tales and during tale-telling, and why they usually use it. The results of research present that these storytellers can use dialect elements in different ways in their tale-telling. The main conclusion is that use of a dialect can be a part of language education, a dialect is an identity marker, and by the help of it a storyteller can create a pictorial experience during the tale-telling, besides it can be a source of humour too.