Bianca Teodorescu

Consideration regarding the celebration of Dragobete and Saint Valentine in the Oltenia region

This article is a comparative and holistic analysis of two celebrations, Saint Valentine and Dragobete, which have the same subject, namely celebrating love. The main purpose of this article is to explain how these two celebrations are celebrated in Romania nowadays, especially in the Oltenia region. We resorted to different types of researching methods such as: participative observation, questionnaires, interviews and meta-analytical method to prove which of these two celebrations are considered more important in our society. In the last years, Saint Valentine has become an important celebration for Romania’s society and it has almost taken over the meaning of our traditional celebration of love. Based on our research, we wanted to better understand this phenomenon, how an imported celebration as Saint Valentine has created its own rituals in the Romania’s culture. Romanian celebration of love is still considering Dragobete, but it doesn’t have the same intensity as it used to have in the past any more. From our research, we discovered that both Saint Valentine and Dragobete receive almost the same attention from people, but the former one is celebrated more in the cities than in the countryside. People from the countryside are less exposed to the influence of Saint Valentine, so it is celebrated in a few villages in Oltenia. However, the Oltenia villages are closer from the anthropology’s perspective to Dragobete and they are more aware of the importance of the Romanian tradition. Also, we found out that neither Saint Valentin nor Dragobete are celebrated in a few villages from the Oltenia region.