A two-volume, 23,800-verse Bulgarian folklore collection, published in 1874 and 1881, presented as pre-Christian scripture. Disputed for 150 years. Here is every entity, claim, and citation behind that dispute — not our summary of it.
The prevailing scholarly consensus, reached independently of this project and consistent for over 140 years, is that Veda Slovena is not an authentic, unbroken oral tradition from a pre-Christian era — but a 19th-century literary construction, most likely the work of collector Ivan Gologanov, built on a published Sanskrit-origin theory and Gologanov's own grounding in classical Greek mythology. The debate is not fully closed: dialectological evidence, independently authenticated folk tales by the same collector, and field-verified singing all remain live counter-arguments.
Vishnu, Shiva, Durga, Kali — but grammatical analysis shows "Vishnu" doesn't decline like a loanword, and "Durga" reads better as the ordinary Bulgarian word "друга" (other).
The Orfen/Harabska-princess wedding saga mirrors Orpheus and Eurydice in striking structural detail — both sides of the debate agree the parallel is real; they disagree on the mechanism.
The birth narrative of Koleda Bog follows the Christian Nativity almost beat for beat — a star, hostile kings, hidden birth — more consistent with a well-read author than millennia of oral drift.
Krali Marko and Tarnovo appear independently across South Slavic oral epic — proof the compiler worked genuine regional folklore into the invented material, not evidence the invented material is genuine too.
Martenitsa, the peperuda rain ritual, and Lazaruvane (a living, UNESCO-recognized tradition) are woven in accurately — incidental proof the author knew real Rhodope folk practice first-hand.
"Ючна Бог" contains a probable Ottoman-Turkish loanword that couldn't predate the 14th century — yet the same glossary admits it doesn't know several other archaic terms.
Celtic druids appear 12 times — only in Volume II, never Volume I — with zero Balkan folkloric footprint. They show up right after the collector obtained Rakovski's book on the Sanskrit origin of the Slavs (1872).
Live data from the project's graph database. Click any node for its citations; drag to rearrange; scroll to zoom. Dashed nodes are free-text references not yet linked to a catalogued entity — see Method → Normalize.