KOSEZI MED ZGODOVINOPISJEM IN KULTURO SPOMINJANJA: (RE)KONSTRUKCIJA, RECEPCIJA IN (RE)INTERPRETACIJE.

For well over a century now, the enigmatic kosezi (in Slovene), or Edlinge (in German), continue to excite the imagination and create agitation in Slovene and Austrian national histories and cultural memories. While Austrian historiography largely advocates for a Germanic origin of this free medieval social stratum, in the Slovene they are established as an integral part of Carantanian society, said to have persevered until the sixteenth and, to a degree, even the nineteenth century. Hence, in the Slovene national imagination, the kosezi provide an important continuity with the ‘first Slovene state’, as Carantania is erroneously regarded in the cultural memory. This paper focuses on the (re)construction and reception of the word kosez (singular) and the social stratum it allegedly designated in Slovene science and cultural memory, while also surveying Austrian interpretations. The analysis shows that the kosezi entered the Slovene national imagination especially due to their key role in the enthronement of the dukes of Carinthia. The role of free Slovene peasants in the medieval enthronement ritual was discovered only two decades before the (re)construction of the word kosez in 1912/13 from fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century toponyms and surnames, as the supposed old Slovene or Carantanian original for the German word Edlinger (singular), attested in earlier sources. The word kosez was unknown in folk memory and its (re)construction was too late to be included in nineteenth-century nation-building, which was the most prolific time for the construction of national myths. Thus, it was only in the interwar period that Slovene historiography and philology made the kosezi, through their role in the enthronement ritual supposedly originating in Carantania, an integral part of one of the key elements of Slovene nation and state-building. After World War Two, the kosezi were further established in Slovene cultural memory, particularly through the reception of popular-scientific works and school textbooks, predicated mainly on the interpretations of the leading post-war Slovene medievalist Bogo Grafenauer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]