ANTHROPOLOGICAL DIMENSIONS OF MARIAN POPULAR RELIGIOSITY
Round table – Cluj Academic Days, 39th edition
Romanian Academy, Cluj-Napoca Branch (Mansard Hall), 9 Republicii Street
Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Wednesday 4 November 2026, 15:00–18:00
This is an initiative of Orma Sodalitas Anthropologica as part of the “Creative Europe Tramontana IV” project.
Pilgrimages and devotions, Marian apparitions, weeping icons and statues, visions, miraculous healings and springs of fertility are the themes of this round table, organised in collaboration with Orma Sodalitas Anthropologica within the Conferences of the Folklore Archive Institute of the Romanian Academy, part of the Cluj Academic Days (2–4 November 2026). The session is moderated by Bogdan Neagota.
Programme:
• Ileana Benga (Folklore Archive Institute of the Romanian Academy, Cluj-Napoca), People and animals in the service of the Mother of God in the answers to Ion Mușlea’s Questionnaire III
• Daniel Tiutiu (Aiud Technological High School), “The woman who saw the Mother of God”. The story of a Marian apparition in the Mureș Valley, 1938
• Bogdan Neagota (Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca), Marian apparitions: local and transcultural, tradition and mystical experience, ethnology and history of religions
• Vasile Mathe (Orma Sodalitas Anthropologica / Avram Iancu Secondary School, Turda), The pilgrimages to Bixad. On foot with the Prosâțele of Tarna Mare (Oaș / Romanian Ugocea). Film, 60 minutes
• Ioan Apostu (Folklore Archive Institute of the Romanian Academy, Cluj-Napoca), Through the cameraman’s eye and the pilgrim’s soul: the pilgrimage to Nicula Monastery for the Dormition of the Mother of God, between archival document and digital reconstruction. Film, 20 minutes
• Bogdan Neagota (Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca), Marian pilgrimages, patronal feast pilgrimages. Aspects of popular religiosity among the Ukrainians of Maramureș (Bixad Oaș and Sighet, August–September 2026). A visual ethnological description, 50 minutes
Book presentations:
• Grațiela Tiutiu, Daniel Tiutiu, Viața Pustnicului Arsenie de la Râmeț, Editura Universul Școlii, Alba Iulia, 2025 (presented by Bogdan Neagota)
• Dictionnaire des apparitions de la Vierge Marie, edited by René Laurentin and Patrick Sbalchiero, Fayard, 2012 [2007] (presented by Bogdan Neagota)
• Joachim Bouflet, Les apparitions de la Vierge, Calmann-Lévy, 1996 (presented by Ileana Benga)