ETHNIC MOBILITY IN BALLADS: Selected Papers from the 44th International Ballad Conference of the Kommission für Volksdichtung

comprises studies about ballads that in different ways reflect the movement of ethnic

groups, transcending and defying national borders in ways that range from the

borrowing of ‘national’ heroes to popular interpretations (and distortions) of ethnicities

not one’s own, to the transfer of humour from one ethnicity to another. The studies are

the result of the 44th International Ballad Conference of the Kommission für

Volksdichtung, held in 2014 in Pécs, a city in Southern Hungary (Cultural Capital of

Europe, 2010) which was occupied by the Ottoman Turks after the defeat of the

Hungarians at Mohács in 1526 and inhabited by them for over a century, so it is hardly

surprising that several of the papers make up a distinct group about balladic Turks of

one degree of reality or another, but a study about the Slovenian appropriation of a

Hungarian ‘hero’ is also indicative of the spread of the papers.