FOLK CALENDAR

FOLK CALENDAR, historically evolved system of organising, counting and regulating days of a year. It helps schedule a sequence of traditional customs, rituals, and holidays, household practices, and to a large extent, religious and folklore practices. The Bashkir F.c., combining the solar and lunar types of calendars, was closely connected with the phenomena of nature. Each calendar system performed a defined function. The first Bashkir F.c. was based on the Turkic calendar with a 12‑year cycle; each year of this cycle was named after an animal: mouse, cow, leopard, hare, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, hen or rooster, dog, pig. Each year was believed to have its own features based on supestitions: the Years of the Mouse and Cow were considered productive; Leopard — a year of abundance; Hare and Monkey — poor harvest and hunger; Dragon — rainy and yielding; Snake — arid; Horse — cold and lean, a year of wars; during a Year of Sheep they usually waited for cold winter, but it was considered prosperous and productive; years of Rooster and Dog were accompanied with severe and long winters; in the year of Pig they expected abundant rains and times of trouble. According to the solar calendar and zodiac constellations, later based on the Christian calendar, the seasons of the year, the time of nomadic migrations, later — of agricultural works, were determined. With the adoption of Islam Hijra calendar was introduced, while with accession of Bashkortostan to Russia they began to use the Gregorian calendar. The traditional holidays and rituals gradually began to include Muslim holidays. Four seasons (spring, summer, autumn, winter) were outlined. Based on the Gregorian calendar, the beginning of each month was on the 22nd day. New Year — Nauruz — was celebrated from the 21st through the 22nd of March. The name of each month was associated with natural phenomena, seasons or agricultural works. The Turkic and Arabic names of months were spread (ref. Table 1). The names of the days of the weekcomefromthePersianlanguage. There were also other names of the days of the week, associated with the names of the planets of the Solar system (ref. Table 2).