This piece folklore was gathered at the San Fransisco trauma recovery center. I met with a group of social workers and over the course of one hour we all got came together in a meeting room and in one big group we decided to go around the table and each discuss folklore from their lives. At the beginning of the discussion I gave a brief description about what folklore could be. After that everyone shared pieces of folklore from their lives.

“We have a saying in Bulgaria that the god was giving space for each nation Bulgarians were late, as usual, so when they arrived everything was given away so god felt very sad about that and gave them a peace of heaven. So in heaven they have many beautiful mountains and rivers and sea and all apparently heavenly nature.”

Background information about the performance from the informant: “This story was told to me and school as a kind of nationalist fable about our country. Bulgaria is very sort of dreary and not a lot of fun so this story was designed to help make us feel better about the country we lived in by telling us we have an especially nice spot in heaven.”

Final Thoughts: This is one of the more nationalistic pieces of folklore that I collected. It appears that the story is told with the express purpose of making Bulgarians feel more proud of their national identity. This story seems to imply that the concept of the nation state is so integral to the way the world works that God expressly thought about it while creating the earth. They also imply that being Bulgarian is something which has been ordained by god and that nations are holy creations as opposed to political creations.