THE TRANSFER OF CULTURE IN THE FLAT COUNTRY

Abstract

After the end of the Second World War, the largest exodus that the Macedonian people has experienced took place, the consequences of which are felt even today. Countless Macedonian families, under duress and threat, were forced to continue their life paths in other places, places that in their mental code should represent their new home. The loss of homeland and home becomes a reality for the Aegeans. As historical records confirm, those forcibly expelled continue their lives scattered all over the world. One part of them continues their life in the other, the free part of Macedonia, which was then an integral part of SFRY. Others, on the other hand, were taken to Vojvodina, to the villages from which the Germans were evicted after the liberation. Losing one's homeland turns one into a stranger. Always living somewhere else, makes the stranger not belong anywhere. The lost homeland in his mental consciousness becomes an ideal place, a dream place for which he constantly longs and grieves and a place that turns into a desired model of living
The most painful, the longest process of their re-rooting begins, the process of moving into a new territory, adopting a new culture, and that process is long. The process of their acculturation begins. The transfer of cultural values and the reception of new ones in the new environment among refugees results in a return to the original culture of the ancestors and life in two parallel worlds: the old and the new. This paper traces that process through examples from novels that follow the saga of the Exile. In the introduction, the paper presents the historical background of the events that caused the exodus, as well as the consequences that resulted from it. During the research, emphasis is placed on the contact of the refugees with the foreign and the unknown. So they become people with a fake address. One in their mental consciousness, in their experiencing and becoming, and the other real, factual, the one on which they will have to continue their half-interrupted life continuity. The process of acculturation for the Aegean Macedonians turned out to be unsuccessful. Despite all their efforts to transfer the old to the new and thus to affirm the new as close and familiar, the wind of the grandfathers is the reminder that the flat land is not their ancestral land. It does not have the centuries-old hearths that are a constant reminder that someone was here before us just as we were before someone. In their mental code, a reactivation of the source culture occurs in response to the stress caused by acculturation with a reverse process such as anaculturation. Basically it is nothing but de-assimilation and preservation of cultural and ethnic values from oblivion.