Slavic culture and myth
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 3 October 2023
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Tales of adventure and magic connect the Slavic lands: East Slavs (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus), West Slavs (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland) and South Slavs (the countries of former Yugoslavia plus Bulgaria). Matthew Sweet has been reading a new collection of Slavic myths. The authors Noah Charney and Svetlana Slapšak join academic Mirela Ivanova to talk about the way Slavic tales connect with stories from Greece, Rome, Egypt and Scandinavia and how they were used to bolster power in new Slavic nations.
Producer: Torquil MacLeod
The Slavic Myths by Noah Charney and Svetlana Slapšak and illustrated by Joe McLaren is out now.
You might also be interested in a Free Thinking discussion of Albanian culture and history, and in a Radio 3 New Generation Thinker Essay from Mirela Ivanova called Contesting an Alphabet about the competing claims over the invention of Cyrillic.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Can I just say? |
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| 0:10.6 | The roof is buckling. |
| 0:11.9 | Where you can also listen to live sports commentary. |
| 0:14.2 | It's right foot goes for goal. |
| 0:16.7 | And then enjoy even more podcasts full of analysis and reaction to the big stories. |
| 0:21.7 | The stat that is astonishing is they ended with the lowest amount of possession. |
| 0:25.2 | And she's had to live with that. |
| 0:26.8 | So if you love sport, a passion, it's almost like a religion. |
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| 0:35.8 | BBC Sounds, music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:39.3 | Come to the mountains, come to the forest, come and listen to the Arts and Ideas podcast with me, |
| 0:45.3 | Matthew Sweet, after these messages will be exploring Slavic myths. |
| 0:50.3 | I'm Tom Allen and this is Monsters of Music, the podcast in which we explore the scandalous lives of classical musicians to work out if they were angelic geniuses or grade eight monsters. |
| 1:04.3 | He's definitely going to be a monster. Where did he get their fingers and their skulls from? |
| 1:08.7 | We'll hear the twisted tales of virtuoso musicians and then place them on our monster scale |
| 1:14.0 | from an angelic one to a full-blown demonic ten. |
... |
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