Did you know there was a black ambulance riding around Czechoslovakia during the s, kidnapping children for their organs? Ethnographer Petr Janecek recently published what is his second collection of such stories, proving that folklore is definitely not a matter of history.
Its title - Cerna Sanitka or The Black Ambulance - refers to one of the most popular stories of its kind. It starts with fairy tales in childhood. People like to listen or watch fairytales. They like to joke and to listen to jokes. And these urban legends are very similar to jokes. But the main difference is that joke has to be funny to be passed on in oral tradition.
Urban legend can be funny - we have some legends that are very close to jokes - but most are like warnings. You have a feeling that our society is endangered by someone or something and people like to warn others. When I was at primary school, teachers and parents told us to pull off the tip of a banana before eating it. Because a child once died after eating a banana. Doctors found out that it was snake poisoning! Later, the police discovered that the tip of the banana was poisoned by a South American snake that lives in banana trees.
When they pick bananas they have to shake the trees. This popular cautionary tale was recorded by ethnologists in s and s all over Europe in many different variations, featuring spiders, scorpions or snakes. In one Czechoslovak version the myth has been turned into propaganda, claiming that the bananas sent to the socialist markets were poisoned by western capitalists. In his collection, Petr Janecek divided the myths according to their most common themes.
Besides food, modern folklore frequently deals with murders, accidents, alcohol or sex. A whole chapter is dedicated to domestic animals:. A friend told me he was travelling on the underground and saw a woman getting on the train with a dog on a leash. But the door was already closing and the dog stayed outside!
