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Katarina Srimpf
Residents of Lemberg as Other
Joke-telling is one of many widespread social phenomena. According to Christie
Davies, jokes that target groups with the label “stupid” and “canny” are the most
numerous and widespread (Davies 2011: 20). Jokes and humorous tales that refer
to stupid and foolish people are known in many counties including Slovenia. Simi¬
lar to the countries, Slovenia has villages and towns whose “stupidity” was the basis
for many humorous tales and jokes. This article involves a particular Slovenian
town called Lemberg. Its inhabitants are known as the Lembergs.
Lemberg is a village situated in southeastern Slovenia. The village and its inhab¬
itants are ridiculed in various humorous folktales. The people of Lemberg are pre¬
sented as fools involved in ridiculous events from shooting sausages and swimming
in linen to lifting a bull on the bell tower. These stories are told principally in the
region in which the village is located, although some of them are also known in the
Lower Carniola region and in towns in the Styria region. In the neighboring towns,
the label “Lemberzan” (inhabitant of Lemberg town) means a fool, a person who is
not capable of doing anything right.
Lemberg is not the only town in Slovenia whose inhabitants are butts of hu¬
morous tales. Aside from Lemberg, Ribnica, Marburg, and Verzej are most widely
known in Slovenia for their ridiculed habitants. In the first half of the twentieth
century, Fran Mil£inski published a series of stories concerning an imagined town
called Butale and its inhabitants, “Butalci” (1949). The majority of stories are taken
from the Slovenian and international folk tradition. Contemporarily, humorous
stories about Butalci are commonly known. ‘They are so well known that they have
replaced the stories from the oral tradition. Humorous stories from towns such as
Lemberg or Ribnica, which were during the first half of the twentieth century rec¬
ognized around the Slovenian region, are now replaced with stories about Butalci.
Stories about Lembergs and other inhabitants of foolish towns are currently main¬
tained only in the local environment. There is no visual material that refers directly
to stories about Lemberg or any other similar town. For this reason, I will present
the caricatures that were published with stories about Butalci. The only author that
was dealing with Slovenian humorous tales was Niko Kuret. He published in 1954
a booklet entitled Humorous Tales of the Lembergs (Kuret 1954). That was the first
and last research dealing with humorous stories from the Slovenian oral tradition.
This article is a continuation of the research of those humorous stories.
Presentation of the Settlement
Lemberg is a settlement in the Slovenian Styria region with 136 inhabitants, ac¬
cording to the 2002 census (Popis 2002). The settlement is situated in a narrow