Mythological landscape of Karst, Slovenia. From the symbolism of boundaries to mountains floods.

By mapping folklore narratives of the “supernatural” and ritual activities onto the landscape, interdisciplinary research demonstrates that village and estate boundaries embody liminal symbolism, marking thresholds between the “world of the living” and the beyond. Oral traditions concerning apparitions, sacrifices, burials, deaths, and the killing of folkloric beings are particularly concentrated along cadastral and estate boundaries, endowing them with a “supernatural” dimension and preserving traces of Slavic cultic spaces. Interdisciplinary analysis combining folkloristics, anthropology, archaeology, and geodesy further reveals that many old landscape boundaries were marked by Slavic and Christian sacred sites. Historical records and ethnological research also indicate that landscape boundaries were connected with a variety of ritual activities, one of the most interesting being “death resting places.” Several mythical mountains in the landscape of the Slovenian Karst function not only as boundary markers but also as cosmogonic mountains, threatening people with floods from within. Such is the case of the hill named Čuk, where a serpent or devil was believed to control the water inside the hill, and ritual processions were organized to protect the villages below from flooding. Another cosmic mountain is Nanos, which was believed to stand on pillars, and if they were to collapse, the region would be flooded. Drawing on these and similar oral traditions related to specific landscape features, the paper reflects on the meanings that such flood-threatening mountains held in traditional culture.