Grape Harvest Festival in the Small Carpathian Region (Slovakia): The Case of a Useful Partnership between a Town and the Festival

The project focuses on the basic ethnological research of Slovakia’s festive culture after 2000. Its aim is to qualitatively deepen and expand knowledge about festivals through an in-depth study of a selected case – a grape harvest festival, called vinobranie, organised in the autumn of each year in the public spaces of towns and cities with historical wine traditions. The project builds on the latest trends in festival studies and event studies. Celebration is conceptualised as “invented tradition” (Hobsbawm, Ranger, 1983), which makes it possible to answer the project’s research question: which elements of cultural heritage form the emblematic characteristics of festivals, and how festivals act through them in the development processes of particular locations and regions. The research data analysis applies the concept of “festival” (e.g. Getz, 2010; Cudny, 2016) and “eventisation” (Gebhardt, 2000; Hitzler, 2011). The findings compiled into a synthetic monograph manuscript will be the main project output.

Key words: eventisation, festival, festivalisation, festive culture, grape harvest festival, Slovakia