Marko Cepenkov spent much of his life gathering the stories, songs, sayings, customs and oral histories circulating through nineteenth-century Macedonia.

This selection presents sixty-six of his folktales in English, translated from Macedonian by Fay Thomev. It is less a polished literary anthology than an archive of stories still carrying the habits of oral transmission: abrupt transformations, repetitions, improbable bargains, practical peasants, foolish husbands, devils, saints, animals and travellers who wander casually across the border between the ordinary and the impossible. 

The tales are frequently comic, cruel and materially alert. Hunger, marriage, labour, money and social rank matter as much as enchantment. A man may become a stork, a wolf may negotiate, or a supernatural intervention may settle an argument, but the stories remain rooted in village life and its systems of obligation, gossip and survival. Their morality is rarely clean. 

Cepenkov’s enormous body of collected folklore helped preserve a Macedonian oral culture that might otherwise have survived only in fragments. Published as the first volume in Macquarie University’s series on Macedonian literature, this was the first substantial English-language presentation of his work. It is an unusual and valuable book for readers of Balkan folklore, oral history, mythology and the strange social machinery hidden inside apparently simple tales. 

Macquarie University, 1991. First edition in English, translated by Fay Thomev. Paperback with light edge and corner wear; clean and firmly bound.