Sarakatsan Folktales

This volume contains a selection of tales recounted to me by Sarakatsan men and women. I also supply a number of popular traditions, legends and mysteries. The Greek edition should offer material to linguists, while I hope that, more generally, the tales have something to offer students of folklore. Unfortunately the literary merit of the tales is somewhat limited, since there are no truly gifted Sarakatsan storytellers as far as I have been able to discover. Their main problem is that they fail to employ the art of leisurely storytelling, and if you ask them to repeat a phrase you are almost certain not to hear the same thing twice, but instead a variation, while the narrator's patience with his or her listeners tends to wear thin within a very short space of time. On only a very few occasions was I able to follow the course that I prefer in my work, i.e. to listen to the tale as narrated by the storyteller for his and his audience's enjoyment rather than just churning it out for my sake, and then to get them to repeat it to me slowly so that I can write it down, and then for me to read it back to them so as to double-check the transcription. As a rule, I had to confine myself to the last two stages of this process. [...]