The present volume is a bibliographically richly documented overview of forms and facets of performance and ideas of the imagination in traditional oral culture in Southeast Europe. For the first time in a comparative synopsis, performative aspects such as gestures and signs, disguises and masks, role play and dialogue, amateur theater and professional showmanship, puppet and shadow theater, in the ideas of imagination forms of sacredness, popular acts of devotion, image veneration and pilgrimage, votive offerings and animal sacrifices are examined , Demonology, the evil eye, and other superstitions. The study spans languages, nations and religions and brings material from Hungary and Romania, the southern Slavic countries and Albania, Greece and Turkey.