FOLKLORE, LITERATURE AND IDENTITY, OR ONCE MORE ABOUT AZOV GREEKS
Literature in dialects is an essential phenomenon for Greek literature. In Ancient Greek literature each literary genre was connected with some dialect. Superficial unification during the Hellenistic Koiné could not hide regional variants. Literary tra- ditions in dialects reappeared in the late Middle Ages in Crete and in Cyprus and had little to do with the rise of national identity, though literatures in dialects are usually based on local folklore. Local literatures in the dialect are very interesting as a lin- guistic and sociocultural phenomenon. In this article I will describe the development of the literature of Azov Greeks. Raised on the local folklore tradition, it became a part of the unique Soviet experiment of 1920s - 1930s that was tragically inter- rupted in 1938. Modern Azov Greek literature is a typical Greek literature in dialects that lacks readers, subjects and links with today’s life. However, there is still hope to improve this situation if local cultural policy is changed and new web-technologies (like language corpus and online dictionary) are introduced