Legends are an integral part of a village’s identity, passed from old to young within families and communities, though some have also been created more recently by literary authors. In this sense, we cannot really speak of a single village, but of many villages —or many generations— living beneath the same name and continually changing within the same place. Folklore closely bound to a particular village therefore often has a relatively short life in oral transmission because it depends upon a specific context. A legend about a memorable local figure, for example, may fade once the generations who knew that person have disappeared. What remains becomes a kind of narrative archaeology, still capable of carrying us back into the emotional world of another time.

Here you will find legends bound to the name and character of particular villages. Stories that may never have happened and yet are still a form of memory —not the memory written in the historian’s book, but the one preserved in the collective imagination.