ABSTRACT
Traditional festivals celebrate the village as the place that connects the emigrant to a sacred world. Like the core meaning of so many festivals, the Day of the Holy Mother in Zavoj is a commemoration and re-enactment of the values that hold the community together. On this day, the village is vibrant with people, and the feast creates a new form of community that extends back in time to the village origins in Old Zavoj and forward in space to immigrant cities. Comparing the 1988 rituals and the 2007 rituals of the festival reveals a new emphasis on the congregation of the community as social event rather than as religious ceremony. At the same time, the festival is concentrated at the church of St Bogorodica rather than distributed spatially in the village, and the feast is displaced from the housing to the church. The renewed architecture of the church and its grounds manifests the space for this annual re-enactment of the village as community and the annual festival constitutes a re-foundation of the village as home and homeland after migration.
