Spring ritual calendar of the ukrainians of the Republic of Moldova: source study and historiographic analysis
The carried out source analysis revealed that during the XIX, XX, and the early XXI centuries there was a gradual accumulation of the source base about the spring calendar of Moldovan Ukrainians. Articles, monographs, folklore collections, archival records, local periodicals, Internet portals, sites, as well as the author’s self-collected field materials are an important source for studying the problem of spring calendar holidays of the Ukrainian population of the Republic and allow them to be considered from a historical retrospective, to trace the connection with the mother Ukrainian culture, interethnic influences and transformations, to conduct a comparative analysis of old and new holidays and rituals, to consider the stages of transformation of their cultural content. The corpus of published and handwritten materials is a valuable source for further ethnological, ethno-linguistic, folklore and cultural studies. It makes possible to trace the originality and territorial and local differences of the Ukrainian ethno-culture on the territory of the Republic of Moldova, to identify the commonality of basic, allUkrainian, as well as distinctive, characteristic exclusively of the Ukrainians in Moldova, elements and features of the spring rituals.