ИСТИНА

The focus will be done at methods of the Russian School of Ethnolinguistics, e.g. the transfer of linguistic methods to the study of the Modern Greek folk culture, with an emphasis on the historical (diachronical) and genetic aspects of research. The study of verbal, actional and subject codes of traditional culture of Modern Greece can contribute significantly to the reconstruction of archaic Balkan elements and to the research of their origin. The centuries-old history of numerous contacts of Greeks with other peoples of the Balkan and Mediterranean areas had a great influence on the formation of the current folk mythological system, and we can speak about general Balkan mythological types, e.g. Christmas demons (kalikantzaroi-karakondžula-karakondjul), or female mythological characters (nereida-vila-samovila) etc. The historical conditions of constant contacts of Greeks with the languages ​​and cultures of the southern Slavic area led to the appearance in the Greek system of some new mythological characters, which come from the Slavic tradition. This is the case of the characters mora and smerdaki and corresponding lexemes (μόρα, σμερδάκι), which were adopted by Greeks from Slavs. In other cases, only the word was borrowed, for example, rather early in the Greek language came the Slavic lexeme v’rkolak> βρυκόλακας, then it became widespread, but some basic characteristics of the Slavic character did not pass in the Greek cultural tradition. In addition to lexical borrowings in the sphere of mythology, some conceptual motifs (e.g. 'shadow', 'noon', 'Saturday', 'wind') can be found, they are common to the folk culture of Greece and South Slavia. As the research has shown, a commonality of the beliefs and the similarity of the motives for the mythological character's nomination are caused by certain unified general Balkan beliefs about this or that phenomenon, for example, "Saturday" people (savvatogennimenos, savvatianos, sbotnjak etc.) with the internal form "Saturday", "vampire, walking dead". The paper is based on the materials collected during our field work in Greece (1998-2016) and on the data base for Modern Greek mythological system collected by the author. As an example of the areal aspect of recearch we will focus at the representation of the folk mythology of the Darnackochoria (5 villages in Serres regional unit, Greece: Emmanouil Papas, Agio Pneuma, Chryso, Neo Souli, Pentapoli), where we made ethnolinguistic field research in 2015-2016. The situation with the distribution of this dialect vocabulary is extremely interesting, because for mythological characters with almost identical characteristics, we found completely different lexemes, for example, for the female character «neraida»: καλότκες, διάβες, τυμπανούδια, νεράιδες. As we can see from the compiled ethnolinguistic maps, the isoglosses pass almost clearly along the boundaries of villages. The existence of such a diversity of lexemes for determining one common phenomenon, and almost complete ignorance by the villagers of the specific mythological vocabulary used by their neighbors, is a unique phenomenon, especially taking into account the conditions of compact living of the entire local population (the distance between villages is from 3 to 6 km), and close communication between residents (marriages, organization of joint festivals and public works). In our opinion, this can be explained by the fact that the folk mythology as a very closed system, which does not give themes for everyday conversations, during which an exchange of dialectal vocabulary could take place. The Modern Greek mythological vocabulary is an interesting material for scientific research, which can be studied using different methods of analysis: with the help of an etymological analysis of the name of the mythological character we can determine the historical roots of the origin of the character; through the analysis of the internal form of the word - to find out what unites the mythology of different Balkan regions, especially the Greek and the South Slavic, general beliefs and methods of nomination based on any special Balkan concept or an important mythological phenomenon.