Festivals & Cultural Identity | The Meaning Behind Croatia’s Brodsko Kolo

In this story about the Armenian alphabet, it shares the historical story of the Armenian language and how it persevered through the years, including:

• An overview of Slavonia’s complex history as a border region influenced by the Western Roman Empire, Lombards, Slavs, Ottoman Turks, and the Austrian Habsburgs, and how this diverse heritage created distinctive traditions recognized by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage
• A description of the Brodsko Kolo festival, Croatia’s largest and oldest traditional dance and song celebration, held annually since 1963, where the Slavonski Brod Folklore Ensemble’s 300 members perform inside the historic Brod Fortress
• Personal accounts from dancers like Mirela Mrvelj, who knows 50 different dances and once felt transported to the past, imagining her grandparents’ lives while performing bread-making motions, and her siblings Matea and Matej Vinarić, who wear their great-grandmother’s and grandfather’s 90-year-old costumes
• Reflections on how Croatian traditions serve as acts of cultural resistance and survival, including the continuation of Brodsko Kolo even during the 1990s war, when the city was “under the heaviest shelling,” and the modern challenge of preserving this heritage as young generations turn to video games and foreign media

Expected Learning Outcome:

This lesson includes clear expected learning outcomes that support students in understanding cultural identity through first-person perspectives, while building intercultural awareness and connections between individual experience and global traditions.

• Students will identify and describe key cultural practices and beliefs from the lesson’s focus community (i.e., Slavonian culture). 
• Students will articulate insights into their own cultural identities and how those identities relate to what they learned. 
• Students will analyze how cultural expressions (like festivals) reflect values, history, and social traditions.
• Students will compare perspectives across cultures while finding similarities and differences through human themes. 
• Students will make connections between cultural traditions and broader global contexts (conquest, folklore, cultural preservation), showing critical thinking about identity and intercultural understanding.