The dragua of Albania. Concerning the typological peculiarities of the character in the context of Balkan tradition

The paper polemizes with the “pre-Roman” interpreting the genesis of the dragua images in Albanian folklore. The mythological character – a chaser of hailstorms by confronting another character who is, in turn, leading the hailstorm, and thus protects his “own” territory from the hail and tempest, is a very popular figure in all Slavic (as well as in neighboring non-Slavic – Albanian, for example, as far as the Balkans are concerned) traditions. The paper considers the functional and typological parallels between the Albanian dragua (drangoni) and comparable mythological characters from Serbian and Croatian tradition – the zmajevity/alovity people, and claims that the peculiarities of Albanian tradition are not in some initially specific invariant directly stemming from the pre-Roman tradition but in the incorporation of the images of dragua (drangoni) into the later literary tradition. With that incorporation, dragua lose one of their key typological characteristics in the oral folk tradition – namely, the motif of their souls leaving their bodies to combat the demonic adversary – and enter the timely sociopolitical context as some personification of Albanian patriotism – what, in turn, is based on a comparison (typical both for Albanian oral heroic epic and for other Balkan traditions) of a cultural hero to a mythological character – the chaser of the hailstorms.

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